One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (10 page)

Sgt. Matt Abbate showed no fear of death, but when not on patrol he was everyone’s big brother. At night, he circulated among the squad campfires, appending “dude” to his remarks in surfer style. He walked around, pointing his finger like a pistol and quoting absurd lines from the cult film
The Way of the Gun
.

“I promise you,” Abbate slowly drawled, “a day of reckoning that you won’t live long enough to never forget.”

He shared his homecoming plan of packing his wife and two-year-old-son, Carson, on the back of his Harley and roaring around Big Sur. When he talked to his family every few weeks, he never mentioned the fighting or his wounds. Recommended for the Navy Cross for pulling the squad out of the minefield, he refused to discuss the incident.

“I don’t fucking want it,” he said. “We all didn’t make it back.”

When someone was down, he’d share his stories about drifting homeless in Hawaii and serving as a waiter on a cruise line. “Lot of things worse than serving in the Corps, bro,” he’d say. “You die when it’s your time. Until that day.”

Matt refused to have a bad day, and the platoon fed off his energy. He made sure at least two snipers hopped on any patrol likely to make contact. He was up for any scheme to kill more Taliban. In one month, he had twelve kills and had charged across a minefield. Garcia was the mind directing the platoon; Abbate was its heart.

“Matt gives heart-to-heart talks that end with a joke,” Lantznester said. “On patrol, he’ll shout at me, ‘Bambi, keep your SAW up! We’re killing those bastards!’ ”

Matt reminded me of Doug Zembiec, a Marine I embedded with during the 2004 Fallujah battle. You couldn’t beat Doug’s enthusiasm down with a stick. He wore a perpetual grin, and was always grabbing you to tell a funny story. One time, Doug led part of his company way too far forward of the lines. They set up inside a block of apartment buildings and were promptly attacked by dozens of insurgents
who were smashing down adjoining walls to get at them. So many bullets were flying that the houses were disintegrating.

As the Marines pulled back, Doug brought up the rear with Master Sgt. Donald Hollenbaugh, the leader of a hush-hush Army commando team. Doug wanted to be the last man to leave. But Don had a special grenade, called a thermobaric, and was determined to throw it after all the friendlies had left, including Doug. The two argued so long they almost didn’t make it out. Doug was later killed in a special operation in Baghdad. Marines still talk about him.

Possessed of that same oddball spirit, Abbate one day approached Lt. Tom Schueman with a crazy scheme. Schueman, a friendly sort with an understated manner, was working out of Inkerman with 1st Platoon. For several days, his platoon had been shot at when they walked past a certain canal. Abbate proposed that Schueman lead a patrol up one side of the canal. Abbate and Laird would move along on the other side, trailing a few hundred meters behind. When the Taliban sneaked up to the bank to shoot across at the patrol, the snipers would bag them. This was risky business. If there were friendly casualties, Schueman was sure to face an investigation.

“What if you get cut off?” Schueman said.

“Sirrr!” Abbate said, looking offended.

Schueman agreed with a laugh. Abbate and Laird killed two that day.

“You should see this one dude,” Abbate radioed to Schueman. “Brains all over the place. They’ll stay away from your platoon for a while.”

In addition to the snipers, a squad of Afghan soldiers lived at Fires. They had their own caves, fire pit, and food. Two or three soldiers, or askaris, usually accompanied a Marine patrol. They stayed in the middle of the column and were the first to enter any compound occupied by villagers. None had volunteered for Fires. If an askari is killed, his family receives scant compensation.

Fires provided a comfortable base. A few ropes were stretched across the small, dirt courtyard to dry out sopping cammies, and a rickety wooden table was loaded with Pop-Tarts, snack foods, and hot sauces. A hand pump in the corner provided cold water for daily shaves and weekly haircuts. Wading across the creeks substituted for showers. For breakfast, the men dipped into oven-sized trays of powdered eggs and ground meat, heated by chemical tabs. Dinner consisted of luckless farm animals or dried foods mailed by the families. Drinking water in plastic bottles came in via resupply from Kilo Company. The biweekly phone calls home followed a ritual. Mothers and wives, reading every day about 3/5’s casualties, would cry, while the grunts claimed they were safe and asked about sports scores.

Each squad had its own block of three or four caves, hacked out of the thick mud walls. To the Marines, these man-caves were luxury condominiums, furnished with cots, notes from third-graders, and piles of goodies from home. Three to five Marines shared a man-cave, decorated in quirky fashion. The days were warm, but the November nights had turned sharply cold in the desert climate, which shed its heat as soon as the sun went down. Third Squad luxuriated in fleece blankets wrapped inside their sleeping bags, while the snipers decided to install wood-burning stoves inside their caves.

Every farm had a mud oven for baking flatbread. After studying the design, Laird’s sniper team spent all day mixing mud and straw with a dash of sand, then carefully packing the mixture in layers inside their cave. By dinnertime, they had built their small furnace, complete with a square chimney for ventilation. Quite proud of themselves, they shoved dry sticks inside, started a fire, and sat back to eat their MREs.

“Let’s test the chimney for leaks,” one Marine said.

Before the others grasped what he had in mind, he pulled the pin on a smoke grenade and tossed it into the furnace. The grenade
cooked off, shattering the furnace and filling the cave with red smoke so thick it permeated into every crevice and piece of clothing.

Each night, the squads sat around their fire pits, eating and talking tactics. Once off duty, they shucked their armor and wore whatever they wanted. The small generator for the military radios provided enough juice to charge the batteries for a few iPods and laptops with DVDs. After dinner, the Marines socialized from campfire to campfire amid a cacophony of blaring hard rock music. Abbate was forever repeating his favorite movie quote,
“You die when it’s your time; until that day.”
Eventually the platoon greeting became
Until that day
. To keep their sanity, Garcia and Cartier slept in the inner courtyard next to the radio room, well apart from the squads and their music.

The grunts took pride in their primitive living. They had water and chow and, far from the first sergeant and garrison chores, were left alone to fight in peace.

On an outside wall, the snipers kept count of their kills. They had carved into the hardened mud a symbol of the cross of St. George. Next to it was a line of stick figures that grew longer each day. The deaths of some stick figures made for fine stories around the campfires; others perished without remark, like the skins of the coyotes killed and hung on the walls.

The grunts mocked, laughed, and marveled about how enemy soldiers react when hit. Only in Hollywood does a bullet blow a man off his feet. A one-ounce bullet cannot cause a 150-pound man to fly through the air. Even a .50 caliber knocks back both shooter and target by only several inches.

When hit, some men stand frozen for a second until the brain registers the intense pain and they collapse. Or the concussive shock from that tiny piece of metal traveling at a thousand miles an hour sends an instantaneous pressure wave to the brain, shutting down all nerve endings. The target withers and deflates, like the air suddenly rushing out of a balloon. Often the adrenaline is pumping so hard
that a man, after being hit, keeps on running until out of sight, eventually dropping unconscious from blood loss. Others stand in place, twitching and shaking as if having an epileptic fit.

Abbate hammered a piece of plywood onto the wall of his cave and printed his “Rules of War”:

Matt’s rules reminded me of the grunt in 3/5 who printed a message on a bridge after the battle for Fallujah in 2004: “This is for the Americans murdered here.” In both cases, the idea was the same:
Thou shall protect no matter what
. We all look hellasick in death. What counts is why we die.

On November 3, Cpl. Jordan Laird was lying on top of a roof as a patrol pushed north of him in sector P8Q toward the Helmand River. The Taliban routinely camped on the far side, indistinguishable from civilians when they rowed across. This day, three of the enemy broke their standing rule and, grasping their AKs, hopped onto a raft. In quick succession, Laird shot two. The third leaped into chest-deep water and splashed at incredible speed into the underbrush.

With the snipers producing kills, Esquibel, Deykeroff, and Thoman led their squads deeper into enemy territory. At the same time, radio intercepts identified Outpost Fires as the key outpost the Taliban were determined to shut down. Until that battle was decided,
the farmers were staying out of the way. It would have been crazy of them to do otherwise. The areas north and west of Fires were ghost towns. A few families still lived in one set of compounds called HiMars, so named because the homes there had been blasted apart by High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. But most farmers moved in with relatives along Route 611, venturing back into the Green Zone only to tend their crops and scooting away when a Marine patrol appeared.

The platoon developed a rhythm of two patrols a day, with the third squad back at Fires ready for quick reaction, in addition to an assortment of standard chores. Every patrol moved Ranger-style in single file, with the point man dropping bottle caps that guided the others and were picked up by the last man in the file. The engineer at point swept a narrow path with his Vallon. More IEDs were detected by alert eyes than by the Vallon, but the device had its place. Sometimes it did signal the presence of a D cell flashlight battery, and in any case it suggested that the coalition had a magical edge in technology.

That was partially true. Secretary of Defense Gates was immensely proud of ramming an MRAP armored vehicle through the sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy.
Costing $500,000 each, the MRAPs saved the lives of many coalition soldiers on the roads.

In the Green Zone, though, there was no comparable technical wonder. The $500 Vallon helped our grunts less than the equally inexpensive Icoms helped our enemy. Radio chatter lit up whenever a patrol left the wire at Fires. Spotters boldly squatted at the edges of fields, knowing they were safe provided they didn’t show their radios. The standard Taliban pattern was to shoot a few rounds in hopes of enticing the Marines to attack directly forward and cross into an IED belt. If one Marine went down, then the Taliban edged in closer while the Marines were diverted.

Third Platoon developed a standard counter. The instant a Taliban
fired, the machine gun crew on the patrol sprayed the suspected area. The chances of hitting anyone, or even striking the right general area, were low. The hope was simply to spoil the enemy’s aim. The squad leader used that interval to orient himself, direct the aim of the Marines, and call back to Fires, requesting mortars or a reaction force.

If the Taliban had only a few shooters, they quickly pulled away. If they had four or more, they lingered until they heard the snaps of Marine rounds overhead before dropping back. The patrol would push on, with the Taliban dogging their flanks. As the patrol passed through some hedges or undergrowth, the snipers would lie down, extend their bipods, and glass the adjoining fields, waiting to glimpse an enemy darting forward. Within three weeks, the enemy was already adapting. Sightings were fewer, most 300 to 500 yards away and lasting only three to five seconds. The Taliban now ran at full speed across openings. Maybe time enough for one shot. Rarely was a man dropped in the open and counted as a definite kill.

The Taliban were poor shots. But during one routine patrol, two snipers—Sgt. John D. Browning and Corporal Laird—had climbed onto a roof for a quick glance around. As Browning brought up his binoculars, he heard a firecracker pop next to his ear. Behind him, a branch snapped off. Flopping down, Browning lay still and waited for his heart to stop racing.
The sniper had perfect elevation
, he thought.
His windage was just a click off
.

A disciplined sniper was the surest way for the Taliban to disrupt Marine patrols in the Green Zone. Yet this enemy sniper did not strike again. No intelligence ever followed about whether he had been killed, moved on, or taken up a safer profession.

When going to the sectors where a firefight was certain to break out, Garcia’s pattern was to send two patrols at different angles to hem in the Taliban shooters, so that mortar shells could drop on them or force them to run across an open field. The Marines were
superior marksmen. But unlike Abbate’s sniper section, they hadn’t fired the thousands of bullets needed to hone the skills to hit fleeting targets. Four out of five firefights erupted, dazzling like a match dropped into a box of firecrackers, and sputtered out without damage to either side. At the end of three weeks, the Marines and Taliban were slugging it out, toe-to-toe. Both sides were adapting, but it wasn’t clear who was gaining the psychological advantage.

On the morning of November 4, 3rd Platoon heard deep rumblings, as though a powerful thunderstorm had struck unseen. The 3rd Battalion of the 12th Marine Regiment was guarding the approaches to the Kajacki Dam. For weeks, the Marines on duty atop that huge concrete structure had watched through powerful telescopes as the Taliban methodically stored weapons and munitions in a set of compounds. The coordinates of each storage point were checked and rechecked, as were the daily movements of enemy and civilians in the vicinity.