One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (23 page)

Lying near me was a first sergeant from battalion headquarters back at Jackson. Sometimes staff members joined a patrol. It helped them understand what was going on and, if there was a firefight, they were entitled to the coveted Combat Action Ribbon. The first sergeant had assumed the classic prone rifle position, sling wrapped around his left biceps, right cheek on the stock, finger on trigger, peering intensely through his three-power scope.
Crack!
One shot.

“Yes!” he yelled.

One kill for headquarters. Garcia glanced up and half smiled. The other Marines on the firing line showed no reaction.

“You too?” I asked Browning, who had just taken a shot.

“Mine’s dead,” Browning confirmed.

Every firefight is a cacophony. To an outsider, it seems bedlam. One persistent Taliban kept shooting from the right side of a large compound wall about 250 meters away. The Marines were responding with short bursts. The noise from an F-18 roaring by was deafening.

The object of all the shooting, in technical terms, is “to attain fire superiority.” That means you smother the enemy with fire until he ducks and returns fire blindly or stops shooting. He is trying to do the same—perhaps you stop shooting to attend to someone wounded or you crouch down because you’re scared. When you see someone not shooting, you kill him, because it’s easy to do. Soldiers have the instincts of sharks. They pick off the weakest first.

The sergeants must control the rate of fire, so that the overly excited don’t run out of ammo. After a dozen times, a squad or platoon develops an innate rhythm. Every action you take is automatic. Call it “learned instinct.” The rhythm of battle is the same in Afghanistan as it was in Vietnam.

“The battle raged around us interminably,” a Marine wrote about Vietnam. “One could not distinguish individual rifle shots; the roar of several dozen automatic weapons—both ours and theirs—
simultaneously firing on full automatic shut out all other sound. So too did the dozens of grenades exploding both farther down the hill and also amidst our positions. Nobody truly had any idea what was happening anywhere except around his own position.”

The noise deafens you. Everyone is blazing away. You are in your own bubble, watching your fire team leader for a signal, and he is watching the squad leader, who is watching the platoon commander, who is talking on the radio with eyes fixed downrange.

“Myers,” Garcia shouted, reaching his right arm out for the radio handset without turning around.

No response for a few seconds. Sergeant Myers was farther down the line, looking toward the compound.

“Goddamnit, Myers!” Garcia’s voice was a whiplash. “When I want you, I want you here now! Stop fucking around!”

The line of Marines jumped as if jolted by an electric charge. It was the only time I heard Vic raise his voice during a skirmish. In all fairness, Myers was only three Marines away. It was not like he had wandered far off. He responded like a firecracker had exploded in his ass, leaping over Marines and thudding down next to his platoon commander.

“Driftwood 2-2, this is Mad Dog,” Myers radioed. “How me, over?”

Driftwood—Spokes Beardsley back at Inkerman—told Myers that the F-18 pilot had eyes on two men on the roof of Building 38, listed on the maps as abandoned.

Myers turned to Garcia.

“Spokes says the planes are too low on fuel to stay on station. Shift to mortars?”

Garcia pointed to a spot on his map. Myers studied it, checked his GPS, and nodded.

“We’re at 7950 8013—at the canal west of Compound 38,” Mad
Dog shouted into his voice mike. “Hit the east side of 38 by the tree line. Give me one adjust.”

Within two minutes, the black puff from a mortar shell drifted up, about twenty meters to the right of the compound. Myers radioed an adjustment and several rounds landed in the compound. The enemy firing ceased.

We were all lying on the canal bank. A few feet in front of us, water was flowing at a fast clip through a four-foot gap in a concrete sluice gate. It looked like you could leap across the gap, but each Marine was loaded down with ninety pounds of gear and ammo. McCulloch looked at Garcia.

“Good to go?”

“Work your way up the right side of the compound,” Garcia said.

Yaz, Doyle, and Palma easily hopped across the sluice gate and moved by rushes toward the compound wall. Mac hung back waiting for Garcia, who had the jumping ability of a concrete block. For Vic, every irrigation ditch offered a challenge. Hopping over a puddle was an accomplishment.

He hesitated, took a three-step run, and launched 260 pounds of bulk and gear into space. It was like watching a bulldozer fly. Plunk. His right toe came down on the edge of the other side and he grasped an outstretched rifle stock. One small step for 3rd Platoon.

Two hundred meters ahead, Yaz slapped a C4 charge on the compound wall, blew a hole, and the Marines went in fast under the concealment of the smoke. The deserted compound had a sad, disheveled air. Inside one room, the ashes of a fire glowed next to a blackened teakettle and a bag with spilled rice. To keep out the chill, a blanket was draped over the doorway entrance. The three or four men who had slept on the hard earth had escaped out a narrow passageway in the back.

In the outside ditch lay the bodies of the men killed by the headquarters first sergeant and Browning. The other Taliban had pulled
out, leaving no weapons behind. The patrol pushed on to the northwest, as the F-18 pilot had suggested before he left station.

Garcia was on the radio with 1st Squad, which was moving up on our left flank. The Taliban were hiding somewhere in the fields between us and the squad. Searching Compound 40, the squad found a shooter’s nest on the roof, littered with spent brass, a few shells still warm to the touch. Banshee 1, a Marine sniper, climbed onto the roof and glassed the fields through the telescope of his 7.62mm M12 sniper rifle. He slowly brought the reticle to rest and fired one bullet, striking a Taliban center mass at 440 meters.

“Hold your positions,” Garcia radioed to his squad leaders. “We might get another squirter.”

Nothing moved in the fields. The Marines waited fifteen minutes, pulled down a Taliban flag, and returned to base. Yazzie and Doyle had detected three IEDs, one of which would certainly have struck down Marines had Yaz not been there. The result was the patrol took no casualties on Day 92. They weren’t cocky about it. They knew more losses were certain to come.

After the debrief, Browning walked behind the snipers’ cave and carved one more stick figure in a mud wall. The rough outline of the cross of St. George was scratched next to the rows of stick figures.

At one point during the patrol, I was kneeling next to a sniper, Cpl. Jacob Ruiz, and his spotter, LCpl. Jeff Sibley. They were glassing a man talking on an Icom outside a compound several hundred meters away. Ruiz, a pleasant young man, dialed in a windage correction and took a shot, missing to the left. The three of us laughed as the man scurried inside the wall. I thought nothing more about it.

Later during the fight, BBC reporter Phil Wood and his television crew were at the rear of the column, unable to move forward to get combat footage. Ruiz was nearby, watching a spotter with an Icom.

“
Got PID [Positive Identification],” said the sniper. “Cleared to engage.”

As Ruiz lined up his shot, he allowed BBC to film it. The Marine Corps is proud of its sniper heritage.
Slate
magazine had posted a quote by Marine General James Mattis.

“We have an overweening sensitivity to the slaughtering of our enemies,” Mattis said. “I’ve put medals on Marines who have killed guys at 700 yards. And I’ve come right out and said it: ‘That was a beautiful shot.’ You must reward the kind of behavior that you want.”

Ruiz behaved as he had been trained. He had killed a man at 700 meters.

“
We watched him talking on his radio,” Ruiz said. “Then he went inside, and came back out trying to look inconspicuous.”

When the video of his shot was shown on the BBC in London, it resulted in a military investigation. After seven weeks of nerve-racking testimony under oath, Ruiz was exonerated. Yet still, the order came down the chain of command not to shoot men talking on Icoms. Ruiz had acted properly as a Marine, but don’t do it again. It was an odd way to reward the behavior the Marines wanted.

Farmers used cell phones rather than the short-range Icoms. In one fight while we were being hit with RPGs, I had heard a farmer in the house behind us shrieking over his cell phone. The Marines left him alone. When I asked why, a corporal laughed and said the odds were he was calling a neighbor, screaming, “How the hell can I get out of here?”

The high command later rescinded the order, leaving it up to those in the battle to decide what to do about a guy talking on an Icom during a firefight.

This isn’t to excuse or make light of war’s wrecking ball. The fighting in Sangin was always distressing and often tragic for the civilians. When the Taliban opened fire, Marines responded with five times more firepower. The BBC’s Phil Wood interviewed on camera several angry elders after Ruiz took his shot and the firing had finally stopped.

“We don’t want your help,” one elder said. “We don’t want your money. You shouldn’t kill us and destroy our property.”

The constant skirmishes destroyed compounds, livestock, and other property, and left in their wake civilian casualties, frenzied mothers, and terrified children. In every fight, 3rd Platoon tried to hang on to the enemy and not let targets fade away to shoot another day. Not a day went by without shots echoing across Sangin. Not one day.

Civilian casualties always are more than those of the fighters. On the first day of the 1944 landing at Normandy, French civilian casualties were estimated at 45,000, compared to 12,000 allied military casualties. In Sangin, the Pashtun tribes weren’t willing to suffer casualties to throw out the Taliban. And although countrywide polls reflected a popular dislike of the Taliban, there was no draft, no tax, and no effort by the Kabul government to rally the people. President Karzai referred to the Taliban, responsible for 70 percent of civilian casualties, as his brothers, and reserved his bile for the American-led coalition that caused the other 30 percent. He incited resentment against the Americans whose presence prevented the Taliban from hanging him.

When I polled 3rd Platoon about what would happen when the Americans left, 43 percent believed the Taliban would be the stronger force, 20 percent believed the Afghan soldiers were stronger, and 37 percent believed both sides were about equal. In short, the platoon gave an advantage to the Taliban, but not a decisive one. Afghans would decide Afghanistan’s fate.

Time and again, ambiguity persisted in distinguishing a cunning enemy from a hapless civilian.

First Squad, with Palma at point, was patrolling up in P8Q. Cpl. Kevin Henson scoped seven men in black walking quickly across a
field 600 meters away, herding women and children. A few minutes later,
Palma took fire. The Afghan soldiers on the patrol, responding quickly, started shooting at a second gang moving in on the flank. Garcia called in the 60mm mortars and the Taliban pulled back, leaving behind two bodies but no weapons.

When 1st Squad next returned, LCpl. Clay Cook dropped a dicker at 375 meters. On the man’s body, the Marines found a wad of Pakistani rupees, a list of names, a Pakistani bank account number, the key to a Pakistani rent-a-car, and a petition to free the prisoners held in Kabul. A family who was watching the search of the corpse nervously asked Stevie, the interpreter: the Marines won’t leave us, will they?

A few compounds away, three men and an elder were standing in the courtyard, gesturing at the frightened family. Insisting the men were Taliban posing as farmers, the Afghan soldiers asked Garcia to arrest them. Lacking any evidence, Garcia knew from experience that the district police would release them. So he gestured for the patrol to continue on.

Day 97. 582,000 Steps

Colonel Kennedy gathered a small task force and headed up Route 611. Accompanied by Afghan Brig. Gen. Zalmay Wesa and Lt. Col. Jason Morris, Kennedy intended to seize a fording point used by the Pakistani Taliban, about fifteen miles to the north. Along the way, Kennedy kept stopping to chat with villagers who had never seen an American. At about the fourth stop, he gave a short, smiling talk about how good life was going to be and moved to the back to let the elders talk among themselves. A man in a dirty man-dress walked up with a rock in his hand and hit Kennedy full in the face, stunning him and bashing in his nose. The man was shot before he could strike a second and possibly lethal blow.

The elders variously described the assailant as insane, a drug user, and “
a person of no account.” But what had the poor man heard every day among the villagers that provoked him to want to kill a complete stranger? Had a cunning enemy manipulated him, or did he reflect the simmering rage of the community?

Kipling’s expression “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” seemed apt. In the middle of nowhere on the other side of the earth, an American colonel was bashed in the face by a villager who had never met him. Pressing gauze against his broken nose to lessen the bleeding, Kennedy proceeded north to the fording point, denying he had headaches.

When 3rd Platoon heard their colonel had been bludgeoned, they shrugged. It didn’t surprise them. Nothing about Sangin surprised them.

Day 98. 588,000 Steps

On January 18, 3rd Squad was hit by machine gun fire, again up at P8Q. A Cobra and a Huey were on call, so McCulloch directed them to chew up the suspected tree line. P8Q was a shooting gallery. No farmers, no people. Both sides went there to fight.

One kilometer to the southwest, 2d Squad was busting up two small boats on the bank of the Helmand River. Seeing a battery, Cpl. Kacey Harmon stooped down and began tracing the wire back to find the jug of explosive.

As J. D. Browning backed away,
another Marine muttered, “Shit, we’re standing next to another one.”

As the two gently backed away, Harmon tripped an explosive, throwing him in the air and fracturing his leg. Despite catching some shrapnel in the face, Delany tiptoed over to Harmon and pulled him out of the minefield. A sniper with a Mark 12 telescopic rifle took
three shots at a man talking on an Icom. The man continued talking until a fourth bullet struck and killed him.