One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (22 page)

Yazzie trotted back to talk with Garcia and McCulloch. All agreed to get out of there.

“We’ll mark this spot for a sweep by the engineers,” Garcia said. “It’s too unstable for us. The assholes have rigged traps all around here.”

Assholes, pricks, stinkies, fuckers, muj … the troops had no pet name for the enemy. Any term of contempt would do. Rarely did they use the words Taliban or terrorists.

For another half hour, the patrol walked north, with Vic Garcia in the middle of the file, far enough behind the point not to be pinned down, far forward enough to call in fire. Third Platoon’s patrol area encompassed six square kilometers, containing hundreds of compounds scattered across about 2,000 fields. Vic’s treasured photomap, overlaid with waterproof acetate, showed every field and tree line, with each compound stamped with a bright yellow number.

Vic occasionally called out something like “Number 23 at our eleven o’clock.” Various Marines would yell back, confirming they were looking at the same compound. If there was disagreement, the patrol took a knee while Vic double-checked and oriented everyone on the same hundred-meter grid. They knew the hot spots, the tree lines and compounds where they were most likely to take fire. If even one Marine disagreed or was uncertain about the number of a compound, the patrol halted while Garcia double-checked their location on his GPS. They weren’t in a rush. They had no appointment to keep, and the last thing they wanted was to call for fire support while not certain where they were.

When we reached the northern edge of P8Q, Garcia called out to me. “This is Belleau Wood,” he said, “where we fought on Thanksgiving.”

I looked at the shattered trees to my front and vast expanse of weeds and dirt leading back to Outpost Transformer to my right. I imagined Matt Abbate shuffling under fire across that field in the glutinous
mud, pistol in one hand and the other holding the litter containing Lieutenant Donnelly.

In his classic book
Battle Studies
, French Col. Ardant du Picq observed that even brave men eventually shirk under fire. To overcome this, he urged commanders to instill in their ranks an esprit de corps—a “
spirit of the body” that infused the soldier with the heritage of his unit.

At Belleau Wood in 1918, the Marines had checked the German advance on Paris. The 3rd Platoon log entry for Thanksgiving 2011 included the words Belleau Wood. Whoever wrote the log had linked that battle to their fight nine decades later. A “spirit of the body.”

Yaz moved at his meandering pace for another half hour before stopping at the edge of a burnt-out field. On the far side about 300 meters away stood two large compounds, their walls gouged by bullets. White Taliban flags, the size of hand towels, were sticking above the tops of compounds farther in the distance. While the machine gun and sniper teams set in their bipods, Garcia radioed his GPS location back to the mortar pits.

“A blind man can see us here,” Garcia said. “We’ll give the muj thirty mikes to decide if they want to come out and play.”

The Marines settled in behind their rifles.

“The stinkies can’t resist sneaking a peek,” McCulloch said, watching the walls through his telescopic sight.

Ten or fifteen minutes passed. No farmers ventured into the fields. The Taliban flags fluttered in the slight breeze.

“I see one,” McCulloch said. “Murder hole on the left wall at three o’clock. Turkey necking.”

Someone was stealing quick glances out of the small hole poked through the wall. Mac steadied the telescopic M4 on his left knee, sling wrapped in shooter position. Without taking his eye from the
scope, he tried to direct a Marine sniper onto the target. When that failed, he took the shot himself. He squeezed off one round from his small caliber 5.56mm rifle. The
pop!
sounded as harmless as a kid’s firecracker.

“Get him?” Garcia asked casually.

Seven out of ten times, a Marine should hit a six-inch diameter hole at 200 meters.

“Don’t know,” Mac said. “I think I saw him flinch.”

No return fire came from the compound.

“Want me to look?” Mac asked.

Garcia shook his head without bothering to speak. By this time in the deployment, the platoon was calling him “the Juggernaut.” No one wanted to let him down or dared speak back to him. There was no way he was allowing a Marine to cross that open field to check it out. Maybe the man was dead, and maybe not. Either way, that was the end of it.

A few Marines munched on crackers. One or two sipped water from their CamelBaks. The written rules didn’t allow shooting at a man peeking through a hole in a wall. The rules required a man to be pointing a rifle before he became a target. No one said
good shot
, or
you probably missed
, or
why’d you take that shot?
Third Platoon had modified the rules to take account of Sangin.

After a while, a man in a black turban and tan man-dress puttered by on his motorbike. He showed no fear when the Marines waved him over.

“Delta rasha!” Mac yelled. “Come here.”

Mac grabbed the man’s hands, muttering that they were too soft for farm work. The man reached into a handbag and handed over a clean document. McCulloch held it up to the sun and squinted, as if looking for a hidden hologram.

“Fuck, this is a message from Osama bin Laden.
Death to infidels
or some shit like that.”

“Give him back his card,” Vic said.

“Claims he’s a mullah going to market,” Mac said. “We let too many of these fuckers go.”

“Tell company to follow him with the Boss scope,” Vic said.

The man wended his bike across the fields toward the road. The ops center, watching him through the G-Boss telescope, radioed that he was driving north. The market was three miles to the south.

“See, he was lying,” Mac said. “Checking out our strength.”

After a while, Garcia decided to return to base.

“The muj don’t like the setup,” he said. “It’s not in their favor.”

Like football teams, small units display individual fighting styles. The Taliban reminded me of the rice paddies south of Da Nang in 1966. Back then, when we moved at night, lookouts in the hostile villagers clacked bamboo sticks to warn of our movement. That was definitely spooky. Similarly, in Sangin the warning net of handheld radios allowed small teams to slip ahead of the Marine patrols. When the patrol crossed an open field, the Taliban opened fire, hoping for a hit or a rash rush by the Marines across a minefield.

The Marines’ counter was equally simple. One four-man fire team with a Vallon peeled off to flank the enemy, while another kept up a base of fire. If the Taliban remained in one position too long, the mortars would find them.

Yaz was leading the patrol across a field with scorched topsoil when he stopped a third time. Again he uncovered a pressure plate IED.

“I can’t figure out the pattern,” I said.

“There isn’t any,” McCulloch said. “The stinkies are fishing. Throwing bait in the water, hoping for a hit.”

We were in the middle of nowhere. What were they fishing for—a Marine, a cow, a kid? There was no rhyme or reason to place a land mine in a field indistinguishable from a thousand others. Or maybe that was the cold ingenuity of it. After all, except for Yazzie’s sixth sense, one of us would have stepped on it. Maybe that was worth someone else’s cow or child.

A few minutes later, the patrol walked past a crumbled wall, startling two large, dark brown coyotes. Again Yaz knelt, disarmed a pressure plate, and blew up a jug of explosives.

Less than a minute later, the
crack!
from a high-powered sniper rifle from the left sent everyone to the ground. A PKM machine gun opened up with short bursts from the right, on the far side of the burnt-out field.

“They’re pissed and tired of waiting,” Garcia said. “Trying to sucker us across to where the IEDs are.”

Garcia sent McCulloch around to the left to outflank the machine gun. Mac saw a man in a dark brown man-dress running away, leaving behind a jug of explosives and two pressure plates. He heard the bolt of a sniper rifle clack open and close, a sign the sniper was close ahead. But it took ten minutes for Yaz to sweep a path forward, ample time for the sniper and the machine gun crew to flee. Mac found a pile of spent cartridges behind a wall and retraced his steps back to Garcia.

On the way back to the fort, the patrol passed three waifs—the oldest about seven—standing in a row amid the rubble of their front door. The house stood next to a large field where, a few months ago, a Marine had stepped on a pressure plate. As soon as the explosion erupted, the Taliban opened fire. Amid the screams and frantic yells for a medevac, the Marines had called for covering fire. An artillery shell had crushed one end of the farmhouse.

Since then, rains had packed the debris into sodden heaps of bricks, clay, and broken concrete. This was the shattered hamlet the Marines called HiMars, after the rocket-assisted artillery shell that had destroyed it.

The father was hoeing nearby. He ignored the Marines’ greetings. The clothes sagged upon the tiny frames of his undernourished kids. Unlike the children we had passed in intact compounds, none of these waifs darted forward with extended hands, shouting “Sharana! Sharana!” (Candy.) They were silent, their enormous eyes following each armored giant who walked by. The pace of the patrol quickened, no sorrow more doleful than a numbed and undernourished child.

Once within sight of the fort, the tension left the Marines. You could almost hear the collective exhale of breath. Home again, with no one down. They stood around, ejecting bullets from rifle chambers before entering friendly lines. One Marine wandered over to a bush to take a pee.

“Hey,” he yelled, holding up a twisted black tube. “Boelk’s 203.”

Months earlier, LCpl. James Boelk had stepped on an IED a few feet outside the fort. His dented grenade launcher had lain in the underbrush since his death.

A half century earlier, I had served as a platoon commander. Had things changed much in fifty years? No pilot from 1965 could sit in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft in 2012 and feel comfortable. Infantry platoons had not experienced comparable technological advances. Since Vietnam, we had added night-vision devices, bulletproof armor, digital communications, overhead surveillance, and dining rooms in the rear. Everything else was pretty much the same—the
organizational structure, the sound leadership, the patrol rhythms, and the rambunctious ferocity of the Marines.

Of all the differences I saw in fifty years on battlefields, the conservation of human life was the greatest. This applied to all combatants—European, American, and Afghan. In two world wars in the twentieth century, the West had engaged in industrial-scale slaughter affecting all combatants. In the twenty-first century, the West and its Islamist enemies had reverted to the tribal mentality of combat. Everyone knew each other in a tribe like the 3rd Platoon or the Taliban warrior band. No piece of ground or inanimate objective was worth dying for. Both sides took care of their own; both sides pulled back if outflanked or overmatched.

The Sangin Taliban were one tribal branch of the pan-Islamist terrorist movement dedicated to slaughtering others, provided there were scant losses to themselves. In Pakistan, the Taliban cultivated some suicide bombers. But none were sent to Sangin to wander zombielike into the rifle sights of a Marine. They called their fallen comrades “martyrs,” but none rushed forward to die. When they sensed they had an edge, they pressed forward carefully, not presenting a target. They were like the Apaches in the 1870s, cruel, brave, and not foolish. They skulked around the ditches and undergrowth. They advocated rhetorical, not real sacrifice. The Taliban did not want to die.

The West was the same way. In World War II, terrain objectives were assaulted time and again until they were seized. The fatalistic notion about the brief, brutal life of a grunt persisted two decades later in the jungles of Vietnam. However, the swift invasion victories in Kuwait in 1991, in Afghanistan in 2001, and in Iraq in 2003 changed that mind-set. Technology and maneuver resulted in success with few losses.

In Afghanistan, the coalition fought, but carefully. It wasn’t a kill-or-be-killed war. Instead the West, including the Marines, embraced the concept of killing, while running the least possible chance of being
killed in return. The grunt was so weighted down with armor that he had little agility. In place of employing fire-and-maneuver in a fight, a platoon applied an overwhelming mass of bullets and explosives.

Day 92. 552,000 Steps

In the morning, the patrol went out again, pushing north two kilometers. In a grove of trees next to a gravel wash, the Marines stumbled across an old four-door Toyota. It bore a strong resemblance to a recent BOLO (be on the lookout) warning about a car being prepared for a suicide bomber.

The Marines marked the location and pushed on toward a cluster of compounds flying the white flags of the Taliban. Through the centuries, armies have held aloft their battle streamers. It’s a way of saying, “Here we are, all ye foolish enough to give challenge.” Back at Fires, the platoon had rigged a flagpole at the patrol base and flew the Stars and Stripes, with the maroon-and-gold Marine flag beneath.

Soon after we saw the Taliban flags, a machine gun burst kicked up a dust line to the right of Yaz. The Marines dropped prone and returned fire. The Taliban were split into three firing positions. The nearest was a tree line along a ditch 300 meters to the Marines’ front. Tiny figures were darting back and forth, popping off a few shots from behind one tree trunk and then another.

About a dozen Marines were lying in a rough row in the soft grass along the bank of a canal. On the far side, across a large and very open field, was a tree line along another canal. On the far bank was an imposing compound flying the Taliban flag. Bullets were cracking overhead, coming from the tree line and holes in the compound wall. In the time it takes to read this sentence, I watched one man, about 200 meters away, dart out from behind one tree and duck safely behind another.