One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (25 page)

Their battle space encompassed eight sectors on the photomap, containing 1,314 compounds. The Taliban could see each patrol coming, but couldn’t stop it. Sooner or later—a day, week, a month—
every Taliban gang crossed paths with the Marines. Relentless patrolling exacts a
psychological toll on even the stoutest guerrilla.

On March 7, Secretary of Defense Gates visited the Marines in a forlorn town called Now Zad. He wondered, as he later wrote, “whether it had been worth what it cost them.”

The next day, he visited 3/5’s ops center in Sangin.

“
Since October,” he said, “3/5 has suffered the heaviest losses of any battalion in this ten-year-long war. This district was one of the most dangerous not just in Afghanistan but in the whole world.”

He congratulated the Marines for having “killed, captured or driven away most of the Taliban.” His remarks focused on defeating the local enemy, not on protecting the population.

“I relish,” he said, “your victories, take pride in your achievements, and take satisfaction as you strike fear into the heart of the Taliban.” He emphasized winning on the battlefield, saying, “alongside the legends of Guadalcanal, the Chosin Reservoir and Belleau Wood will forever be added in Marine Corps history the legend of Sangin.”

Five days earlier at the White House, he had concluded that President Obama, as commander-in-chief, had given up on the mission.

“
The president doesn’t trust his commander [General Petraeus],” Gates later wrote in his memoir, “can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

And what was the position of the secretary of defense? He couldn’t make up his mind, or take decisive action.

“
I was torn,” he wrote, “between my historical perspective, which screamed for caution, and what my commanders insisted was needed for accomplishing the mission they had been given by the president and by me.”

Gates, too, had lost faith in the counterinsurgency mission. His
objective was to build up the Afghan forces and “
dramatically weaken the Taliban,” “
rooting the Taliban out of their strongholds.” He wanted “
a tighter focus geographically” and faulted the Marines for sending their troops to “sparsely populated areas, such as parts of Helmand.” This was a fair point; Sangin was at the end of the earth. Why was 3rd Platoon even there?

Had Gates ordered the commanders to narrow down the mission to building up the Afghan forces and bashing the Taliban, then Colonel Kennedy, Lieutenant Garcia, and a hundred other combat commanders would have proposed new tactics, reducing the losses to IEDs, and striking at the Taliban when and where they least expected it.

The president and the secretary of defense lacked the forthrightness to tell the generals that ten years of war were enough. The failed strategy did not change.

Day 150. 900,000 Steps

In mid-March, I returned to 3rd Platoon. Same mission, same patrol routine.

“We have to walk farther to get into a fight,” Vic Garcia said. “Let’s go up to P8Q. That’s our best chance of drawing fire.”

This display of martial spirit—a desire to seek out the enemy—was quite different from what happened in Vietnam. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the American victory in Kuwait in 1991, was a battalion commander in Vietnam in 1970. He wrote, “
the troops had become so demoralized by the mines and booby traps that they’d lost their will to fight.” He was referring to a battalion that suffered
203 casualties from mines, about the same number of wounded that 3/5 had taken.

By 2011, the American public had tired of our military commitment
to Afghanistan.
Forty-five percent of the public, including veterans, believed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had not been worth the cost. Yet far from being demoralized, 3rd Platoon was trying to pick a fight.

Before leaving on the patrol to P8Q, I went over to the sniper’s area to check their wall. Since my visit in January, the tally of enemy stick figures had increased from about forty to over sixty. Taken together, the sniper section and the three infantry squads reported killing 271 of the enemy. That’s probably high by at least a third; shooters always think they hit more targets than they actually do. But when the air and mortar strikes are added in, it’s not unreasonable that 3rd Platoon did kill 200 enemy.

On a wall near the stick figures were stretched the pelts of ring-tailed coyotes and a few bobcats. Browning—who also cleaned and cooked chickens and goats for the platoon—entertained himself by climbing into a sentry tower at night and using his thermal sight to shoot the coyotes. The reservists on guard duty appreciated the diversion.

Garcia gathered the platoon for a group photo. Since October, the platoon had averaged one casualty per week, and they had two more weeks to go before heading back to the States. With more casualties likely, few smiled for the camera.

“Seven months with no break,” Browning said, “was too long. We were tired.”

Outside the patrol base, shepherds were tending their sheep and cows. Once outside the wire, Yazzie took point. I calculated he was close to one million steps.

“Yaz,” I said, “how do you do it day after day?”

“Habit, I guess,” he said with a shy grin. “You get used to it.”

“How many IEDs have you found?”

“I don’t know, maybe a dozen.”

“Oh, way, way more than that, dude,” Mac said. “You’re awesome, the best in the battalion.”

With a shake of his head, Yaz rejoined Doyle at point. Doyle had joined the Marines to get away from his hometown of Modesto. Now he was looking forward to returning home and going to college.

“Yaz and me,” he said, “have found thirty-eight IEDs. He won’t tell you that. He’s superstitious about numbers.”

We headed northeast, cutting across fields filled with thousands of ankle-high green poppy plants. Afghanistan produced 80 percent of the opium for the global heroin market. A blight the previous year had driven up prices. The farmers in Sangin anticipated a price of $200 for a kilogram of raw opium. During the harvest season in April, the farmers sliced open the pods dangling from the purple poppy flowers. A few days of sunshine baked the gummy substance into a black teardrop that was nipped off and placed in a sack. It was like collecting the syrup from maple trees in Vermont.

A hectare—a field one hundred by one hundred meters—yielded forty pounds of wet, raw opium worth $3,600, four times more valuable than a hectare of wheat. Buyers came to Sangin from Kabul, Pakistan, and Iran. Most of the fields were owned by shadowy syndicates, and the tenant farmers received only 10 or 20 percent of the sales price.

At the grunt level in Sangin, opium and
hashish were ignored, except when askaris went on patrol stoned.

“We have our hands full with the Taliban,” Maj. Steve Wolf, the regimental intelligence officer, said. “The drug problem is the Afghan government’s business. We don’t have a U.S. eradication effort.”

We also walked through several fields of cannabis. In the rich soil next to the Helmand River, the yield of 300 pounds per hectare was twice that of the fields in Morocco, Afghanistan’s major competitor in the global market. A poor farmer, without a tractor or much fertilizer, could earn as much from cannabis as from poppy. He had to work harder, though, filtering and pulverizing the leaves and kneading
the resin into clumps of hashish to be sold to bulk buyers or in the local markets.

It seemed every Afghan soldier had his own stash, and it was hard to pick out those who were high on patrol. And with unemployment hovering around 40 percent, addiction to hard drugs was growing. In recruiting local forces in Helmand, the Marines rejected 17 percent of applicants for failing tests for hard drugs.

Near a fording point across a stream about a kilometer north of Fires, Yaz found and cut a thick white electric wire. Buried somewhere close by was a jug of explosives. Small groups of men glared at us and returned no greeting. After marking the spot, Garcia gestured to Yaz to push ahead.

“They’re jerking us around,” Garcia said. “This place is rigged. No sense sticking around.”

Farther out in the fields, farmers, women, and children were hastening to shelter, a signal that enemy lurked nearby. Staying in file, the Marines knelt and prepared to return fire. Covering Yazzie’s back, Doyle glassed the empty fields to our front. Off to our east, four or five men were idling along on their motorcycles, watching us.

“Fuckers,” Mac muttered.

Captain Johnson came up on the radio.

“We’re watching those spotters on the Godcam,” he said. “Make sure you ignore them. We’re at the end of our tour. Don’t risk Leavenworth.”

In the fall, the platoon had averaged one fight a day. Now it had fallen down to three a week. That was progress, but it hadn’t altered the basic dynamics of guerrilla war. Since my last visit, the Taliban had been insisting the farmers aid them for the sake of Islam. Women, not men, now called openly on the Icoms, knowing the Marines wouldn’t shoot.

When a helicopter gunship buzzed over the motorcyclists, McCulloch grabbed the radio and testily told the pilot to leave.

“Mac thinks,” Vic said to me, “that no one should interfere with his private war.”

Garcia kept a quiet, detached manner. The squad leader ran the show. On one patrol, Vic was carrying the SAW—the machine gun with an astonishing rate of fire. When a fight broke out, Sergeant Dy yelled that he had placed the gun in the wrong place. Garcia quickly hopped up to follow Dy’s directions.

After the Cobra gunship left, Mac led us toward P8Q, where more small groups of men glared at us and would return no greeting. The white flag of the Taliban fluttered over an abandoned farmhouse 300 meters west of Transformer. I glanced quizzically at Vic.

“They still give us the finger,” he said. “That compound is laced with mines. The hell with it.”

Mac stopped in the middle of an open field and we all lay down, the machine gun pointed northeast and snipers scoping the tree lines. Garcia radioed the mortar crew back at base to stand by. The snipers reported that an unarmed man was crawling on his hands and knees to get a closer look at us.

“He might be a spotter,” Vic said, “or an idiot. Leave him alone.”

After waiting half an hour with no action, we returned to base. Garcia was apologetic.

“I was sure some asshole would shoot at us,” he said.

Day 158. 948,000 Steps

Second Squad was patrolling into P8Q when Sergeant Dy saw several men in front of a small mosque from which the Marines habitually took fire.
Shit
, Dy thought,
we’re in for it now
. He waited anxiously while his machine gun team wiggled into position to provide the
base of fire. A single PKM round zipped past the squad kneeling in single file.

After six months of having the enemy shoot and run away, something snapped inside Dy. He wasn’t playing it safe this time. He turned to his squad.

“Let’s go!”

Gambling the Taliban hadn’t rigged IEDs where they gathered, Dy ran across the field toward the mosque. A dozen Marines followed, spread out in a long line. One Marine shot a LAAW (Light Anti-Armor Weapon) that exploded against a wall, sending up a cloud of smoke. As the Taliban ran out the back, the Marines reached the compound and pulled out grenades to clear the rooms.

At the rear of the file, Corpsman Stuart Fuke, twenty-two, stumbled and went down.

“I’m hit!”

Lantznester saw him fall, ran back, and cinched a tourniquet around Fuke’s thigh. Amid the din of the shooting, the other Marines didn’t hear their shouts for help. Lantz and Fuke were
feeling very much alone. Fuke had volunteered to join the grunts because he enjoyed their sense of humor. But leaving Lantz and him out in the open by themselves was carrying a joke too far.

Eventually Dy realized they were missing and the squad ran back. The high-velocity bullet had entered Fuke’s thigh and exited out his ass. It was a serious wound, but of course the Marines couldn’t resist a few wisecracks. Thoroughly exasperated, Fuke grabbed the radio and called in his own evacuation.

The platoon’s ability to call for mortars was restricted. A new battalion, taking over to the north, insisted upon prior approval of any request for fire near its sector. Third Platoon had only a few weeks to go before rotating back to the States.

“After Doc Fuke was shot in the butt,” Sibley said, “Lieutenant Garcia could have packed it in. Instead, he kept pushing us out. Sergeant Dy and I talked about it. We admired how he handled those last weeks, when there were too many restrictions on how we could fight.”

To help, Spokes Beardsley had the Harvest Hawk AC-130 fly over whenever it was in the vicinity. With a loiter time of seven hours and a noise like a washing machine loaded with marbles, the monstrous aircraft intimidated the Taliban. A common Icom intercept was “Don’t do anything when the big gray plane is here.”

A week later, the electronics intercept team at Inkerman reported increasing frustration on the part of the Taliban shura in Pakistan. In the judgment of the senior insurgent leadership, the Sangin local rebels had lost their nerve and weren’t engaging the Marines. So the shura sent in a second batch of jihadists.

The mosque in P8Q was the reception center for foreign fighters. The Sangin elders, harboring no love for Pakistanis, suggested they wouldn’t complain if the mosque went away. This was tricky stuff, since President Karzai ranted about any perceived American transgression. On March 25, Garcia set out with 1st Squad. Video from the blimp showed that after firing from the mosque, the shooters escaped down a tree line. This day, the Marines had permission to return fire with artillery.

Sure enough, about 300 meters south of the mosque, the patrol took fire. But due to spotty communications, the ops center at Inkerman canceled the fire mission. Frustrated, Esquibel and Palma moved forward to try some rifle shots.

“Hey, Sergeant,” Cpl. Porfirio Alvarez, twenty-three, from Connecticut, radioed, “you’re cutting across the field you’ve put offlimits.”

Esquibel felt a tremendous push under his feet and realized he was floating in the air. For a split second, he thought he was dead. Then he landed in the mud. He lay still, afraid to look at his injuries and fearful of setting off a secondary.