One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (29 page)

BOOK: One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

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On November 10, the Marine Corps celebrates its birthday with pomp-and-circumstance balls at 135 American embassies and in cities across America. At one ball, the CEO of a major corporation watched as corporals and their wives walked up to the head table to chat with the commanding general and link arms for a photo.

“This rarely happens in the corporate world,” he said.

A good military leader forms close ties with his unit. Tradition, heritage, and camaraderie unite the ranks. Those factors apply across the board. In themselves, they don’t explain 3rd Platoon’s singular tenacity.

They weren’t fighting for their squad buddies, hoping just to stay alive. If that were their objective, they would have stayed close to Fires. Instead, they pushed steadily farther out.

But they were calculating about each move. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes fought in the Civil War. Reflecting on that titanic struggle, he wrote, “
To fight a war you must believe in something and want something with all your might.” That was certainly true in World War II of the Marines who assaulted islands like Iwo Jima.

But Afghanistan was a highly limited war with elusive and changing objectives. Third Platoon was cunning. Garcia took small bites, alternately encouraging and reining in the squad leaders. The squads were careful not to be cut off. The goal was to kill without swinging with all your might and risking being caught off-balance.

Each month, the Taliban became more wary. They knew 3rd Platoon wanted to put down one or two of them a day. They referred to the platoon by name. They hated the snipers. They asked their leaders in Quetta, Pakistan, for more fighters. But the results were the same: the Marine patrols kept coming.

Why did 3rd Platoon fight with such ferocity? Successful people claim they made their own luck. Unsuccessful people complain about bad luck. The truth lies in between. Chance played a role in shaping 3rd Platoon, because each traumatizing event was offset by a counteraction. The platoon’s cohesion was reinforced whenever it most threatened to crumble.

In early October, when Lopez and Catherwood were killed, Abbate organized the shocked squad and charged through the minefield. When the Taliban flooded Fires, Kilo Company headquarters responded by carrying ammunition through fields of mud. Gunny Carlisle went from man to man, promising Fires would hold. Captain Johnson urged the numbed Marines to remember their forefathers in the frigid cold of Korea. The company’s radio call signs were Sledgehammer and Old Breed, references to Corporal Sledge on the blood-soaked island of Peleliu.

“
A set of ties,” the historian Aaron O’Connell wrote, “… bound
Marines together in ways not experienced by members of the larger and more diversified services. It was not only to the members of their unit that Marines remained
Semper Fidelis
, ‘always faithful.’ It was to an idealized and timeless community of ancestors—the entire ‘family’ of the Corps.”

The day after the flood at Fires in October, Boelk was killed and Lieutenant West was evacuated without his hand and leg. Morale was bleak. Garcia immediately took over, and his reputation bought him time with the platoon. They were willing to be led, if he stepped up. Instead of holing up at Fires, Garcia took the platoon on the offensive, showing that the Taliban couldn’t emplace IEDs everywhere. When a fight did break out, he called back to company, and Spokes Beardsley delivered two F-18s, demonstrating the overwhelming firepower on call to help them.

The snipers became part of the platoon, bagging a kill a day on patrols with the squads. The kills made a huge difference. The IED is insidious because you cannot strike back. One-sided attrition drains the best units. In the legend of Beowulf, the man-eating monster Grendel lurks in the dark green forest. Similarly, the Green Zone had gained mythic stature as the lair of the ferocious Taliban. The snipers turned it into a hunting ground.

On the daily patrols, the Marines shared the risk equally; any one of them could lose his leg or life. Through the daily kills, they shared the satisfaction of revenge. There’s no genteel way of putting it. They patrolled to kill, and they saw the results. Success provided the platoon with confidence.

They slept in caves cut off from the world. Their isolation made them more dangerous. They had only one another, and their only outlet was to kill the Taliban. Abbate’s verve was infectious. “Hellasick” made a mockery of the Taliban. “Until that day” became the platoon greeting.

The Thanksgiving battle was pivotal. The platoon ran to the sound
of the guns, with the squads covering one another. Each squad leader—Esquibel, Deykeroff, Thoman, McCulloch—was a combat veteran. Mad Dog yelled for the gunships, and the gunships chopped down Belleau Wood. From that day forward, 3rd Platoon felt superior to the Taliban. The snipers carved stick figures on the wall, while every member of the platoon kept his personal count.

At night around the fire pits, every member from an incoming patrol went over what he saw, what seemed normal and what seemed out of place. The platoon developed a shared awareness of the situation around them. When they talked, they were adding texture to a common mental map, with everyone contributing.

In the first weeks, they had taken heavy casualties because they had no pattern recognition of the danger zones and likely IED hiding places. They named key terrain features like the Golf Course and Belleau Wood. When they stepped off, they had a collective image of the route they were taking and where they were likely to encounter opposition.

The platoon had depth of leadership. Like wolves, they become accustomed to the routine of the hunt. When a leader goes down, another must step forward, be accepted, and be followed. Lieutenant West went down and Garcia took his place. Sergeant Abbate went down and Browning stepped forward. Third Platoon was never without an Alpha wolf, never retreated to skulk in their caves.

The pressure of his peers motivated each Marine in the platoon. Once Garcia showed them that IEDs couldn’t be placed everywhere, the habit of aggressive patrolling solidified into a routine that no one questioned, because everyone bought into it. They believed their tribe could defeat any foe. Group spirit bound them together. During a fight, when Sergeant Dy riffed by shouting, “We’ll do it live! Fuck it!,” he was signaling confidence in the other squads. Move to contact, identify the fields of fire, improvise, respond ferociously, and move on.

Men like Garcia and Abbate were born with courage in their genes. But how was courage transferred from one man to the next? Looking back, had Abbate been killed in the early October battle, the platoon might have spiraled down. By the time of his death in December, however, a social compact gripped the platoon: win every skirmish.

With December came recognition. The platoon was proud it had been selected to move south during the cease-fire to clean out the sector called PB America. By that time, each squad had developed a tactical rhythm. Instead of being intimidated, the platoon looked forward to engaging the Taliban.

When they returned to Fires in January, the outpost’s isolation increased their bonds. They had only each other. There was no administration, no daily emails from the families, no garrison tasks, no first sergeant with a list of chores. Unlike in the rear, they didn’t live two polarizing lives; they were spared the space capsule called the Internet. They could not escape to home by clicking a mouse. Outpost Fires was their castle, and beyond the gates lived medieval tribes that spoke a foreign tongue.

The heavy rains of February gave the platoon a break by soaking the IEDs. On different occasions, four Marines avoided losing their legs when they set off low-order detonations.

In March, with the end of tour approaching, Garcia lived up to his nickname of Juggernaut by keeping the pressure on sectors like P8Q. The platoon yielded none of the ground that it had seized.

“It would have been easy to slack off,” Sibley said. “But the lieutenant was the same hardass all the way to the end.”

In summary, 3rd Platoon’s cohesion was due to inspiration (Abbate), leadership (Garcia), firepower (Beardsley), aggressiveness (McCulloch), steadiness (Esquibel), and raw spirit (Myers). The mission centered on patrolling until shot at, and then returning fire until the firefight was won. The strategic rationales—building a nation,
installing a turbine at the dam, winning over the Sangin tribes—were at best flimsy. The platoon went forth to fight and kill the Taliban.

The platoon bought into Garcia’s rule: do your best. They didn’t care where each had come from, or would go once back in the States. On their tiny island called Fires, they had only one another, and one million steps to walk.

“We fought,” Yazzie said to me, “because we were so pissed off about everything.”

Yaz always looked for the clearest explanation. As he drives his macho truck to Laguna Beach, he might laugh at Aristotle’s take on the platoon’s spirit. But I doubt that he will deny it.

“
We become … brave,” the philosopher wrote 2,300 years ago, “by doing brave acts.”

Finish every fight standing on the enemy’s ground.