One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (16 page)

“When you take him,” he radioed to the inbound pilot, “tell your crewman to keep the compression bandage tight.”

The chopper came in fast, settling in on the far side of the field. The desperate Marines placed Matt on a poleless litter, a piece of canvas with handles, and sloshed over. Halfway across, they slipped, and Matt fell into the mud. The British chopper crew ran up with a pole stretcher and Matt was quickly loaded on board, face-first. Laird and Nordell crawled halfway inside to hold the dressings.

“Get off the bird!” the flight medic yelled, pulling at Nordell.

“Put your fucking hands on the compress!”

The crew was accustomed to grunts trying to stay with their wounded.

“We got him! Back off!”

As the helo lifted off, the crew shifted Matt’s body and the mass of gauze flopped open.

“Hold it tight!” Laird yelled into the thumping noise of the helo blades. “Tight! Tight!”

En route to the hospital, Matt Abbate died on board the helicopter.

The entry in the 3rd Platoon log was brief.

“At 1300, 3rd sqd departed to sector P8Q IOT support ist squad ambushed to the north from bldgs 63, 64 and 65. Airstrike ended enemy threat but also created a friendly casualty. HA 1894.”

Third Platoon had lost the sergeant with the easy grin and wacky expressions. The Marine who helped everyone else, always leading from the front, was gone. Six inches of exposed flesh between Matt’s helmet and his armored plate. One inch of sizzling metal. A hand not pressed tight as the helicopter lurched skyward. Amid battle’s fury, who can judge the cause?

Grunts live with death; they give it and take it.
But they don’t cope with death any better than anyone else. When one is killed, his comrades feel numb. Death is a black hole, the absence of explanation.

“It is not the young man who misses the days he does not know,” the Roman general Marcus Aur
elius wrote. “It is the living who bear the pain of those missed days.”

The world of an infantryman is unlike any other, and a grunt’s motivation in battle is hard to judge from the outside looking in. The grunt makes instant choices in the heat of battle. He must keep his honor clean even when fighting an enemy who hides among civilians. He must resist the sin of wrath. Abbate had shown the right example.

“When we went out the next day,” Sergeant Deykeroff said, “there was no calling in artillery or anything like that. No revenge. That’s what Matt wanted. Just do your job.”

A few weeks after his death, the sniper platoon attended a remembrance ceremony. The talk wasn’t of the fighting, but of Matt’s weird
sayings and oddball antics. He was friendly toward everyone, and the snipers took turns telling funny stories.

The battlefield is a giant craps table. Every
crack!
on patrol is a white-hot slug of lead breaking the sound barrier as it misses you. Any grunt who is not a fatalist is foolish. Death is as random as it is unexplainable. If you’re very skillful—like Matt—you might tilt the odds a little, but not much.

Sgt. John D. Browning, twenty-six, replaced Abbate as the leader of the ten-man sniper section. Although J.D. had grown up hunting and shooting on a ranch in Georgia, he considered sniper school to be the hardest training he’d received. He had to navigate by compass in the mountains for days on end, hit targets half a mile away, and accomplish missions behind simulated enemy lines. At the end of eleven weeks, only thirteen of thirty in his class graduated. Since then, he had served two tours in Iraq and been wounded once.

Browning admired the tenacity of the Taliban. One time, he was walking in a shallow ditch to avoid revealing his position when a Talib popped up on a wall only a few feet away, firing a PKM machine gun from his hip Rambo-style. Browning called him “real ballsy.”
Fortunately for J.D., the machine gunner was the worst shot in Sangin. Not a single bullet hit home.

When Browning first arrived in Sangin, a British soldier had warned him, “You’ll never get two hundred meters outside the wire.” By the time he took over in December, J.D. was confident there was no mission he couldn’t accomplish with a four-man sniper team. J.D. had read the book
Outliers
, which described how experts practice for 10,000 hours. J.D. had fired more than 100,000 bullets.

On December 4, 1st Squad was pinned down in sector V3J by PKM machine gun fire, and Mad Dog Myers had called back to Fires for mortar support. Back at Inkerman, the watch officer in the ops center listening to Mad Dog’s emphatic radio transmission declared a TIC. Troops in Contact meant that a unit was in trouble and needed help, a condition that permitted the use of air and artillery. Spokes Beardsley authorized an air strike of four 500-pound bombs. The PKM ceased fire and 1st Squad returned to Fires.

To Captain Johnson’s exasperation, 3rd Platoon had developed a perverse sense of pride. They never called in a TIC. Instead, they called for their own 60mm mortars, leaving it up to the company to decide if heavier support was needed.

Outside 3rd Platoon, the toll on the battalion was continuing. On December 5, Pfc. Colton Rusk, twenty, of Orange Grove, Texas, was shot and killed. He had been voted “senior class favorite” in high school. His parents adopted his military working dog, a black Labrador named
Eli.

On December 6, Cpl. Derek Wyatt was killed, and the next day his wife, Kait, delivered
their son, Michael.

The 800 grunts in the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines had been together for eighteen months. Every man knew at least 200 others by their first names. A day after a death in one company, the other companies heard about it from someone who knew the deceased. That closeness spread stress in a way we grunts hadn’t experienced in Vietnam.

One night out in the rice paddies back in 1966, my rifle company was hit by mortars as we crouched in our holes inside a grove of palm trees. It was pitch black except for the flashes of the exploding shells. One Marine, badly wounded, was screaming for his mother, his raw terror shivering to listen to. Others tried to comfort him, but he died shrieking. At dawn, his body was carried out in a poncho liner. He was one of five replacements flown in an hour before the mortars hit. We didn’t even know his name.

The opposite was true in Afghanistan. When a grunt was killed, everyone in the company knew him personally. In 3/5, it was especially tough because the deaths were coming only a few days apart. On average, a battalion in Afghanistan lost one man a month; 3/5 had lost twenty in two months.

It was excruciating for the families back home. No one was emotionally prepared for the onslaught. At Camp Pendleton in California, the wives knew each other. The same stream of emails and cell phone messages that nurtured close bonds also heightened anxiety and made sleep impossible. Standard procedure was not to release names of the fallen until the next of kin had been notified. But in the digital and cell phone age, news of an IED strike carried back to the States as swiftly as the sound of the explosion.
Who was it this time?

Gen. Jim Amos, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, met at Camp Pendleton with the families of 3/5. As an aviator for thirty years, Amos knew the shock that followed each plane crash. As a wing commander in Iraq, he had written letters to bereaved families. Now as the Commandant, he was meeting with the families of a battalion that had been battered, and would continue to take losses.

Amos was by nature an empathetic man, a listener with an understanding manner. When he met with the families, they hit him with a hundred questions: Why weren’t we warned Sangin was a hellhole? We didn’t sign up for this! What are we accomplishing? Why aren’t the Afghans fighting? Why can’t another battalion take some of the strain?

Amos was not willing to pull 3/5 out of Sangin. That would have been defeat, encouraging the Taliban to defend with equal ferocity elsewhere. To quote Napoleon, “The moral is to the physical as three to one.” 3/5 was staying put to slug it out.

Of course, that brought discomfit to the families. The stress-filled meeting stretched on, hour after hour, with no resolution possible. Marines fought until they won. Their mascot was a bulldog. Winning was the core value of the institution.

General Amos was in a rough spot. It would be idiotic to express that battle cry to anxiety-ridden families. Nor could tender words assuage legitimate fear. The Marines of 3/5 would continue to fight and to die, and their families would continue to worry.

Day 56. 336,000 Steps

Garcia sent 2d Squad into P8Q, while he brought in 1st Squad from the north, trying to catch the enemy between them. As they waded across the wide canal at the entrance to P8Q, Sergeant Dy’s squad drew PKM and RPG fire. The Marines dove for cover and Dy radioed the coordinates of five shooting positions located in the rubble of bombed-out buildings called “Bad-Guy Central.”

Dy saw a man about 150 meters away duck out of one compound and run hunched over to a nearby rubble heap. Dy waited until the man lay down and then lofted a 40mm grenade onto the heap. The Marines laughed and followed up by shooting an AT4 rocket at the same spot.

First Squad had moved in from the north. While the smoke from the rocket was still hanging in the air, Mad Dog Myers came running down the canal bank, waving his radio handset.

“Dy! Get down!” he yelled. “Danger close!”

“What!?” Dy yelled back, deafened by the gunfire.

“Just get down!”

Myers grabbed Deykeroff, pulling him down while frantically waving at the other Marines to do the same. Seconds later, a salvo of hundred-pound Hellfire missiles chewed up the rubble pile. When his ears stopped ringing, Dy looked up to see a giant, gray four-engine aircraft thundering by.

Beardsley flew KC-130s, the workhorse of transportation aircraft. The KC-130 community had converted a few of the aircraft into the world’s largest gunships. Weighing 160,000 pounds and over one hundred feet in length, “Harvest Hawk” bristled with missiles and telescopes. Using his pilot contacts, Beardsley had asked the Hawk to do a fly-by. When Mad Dog had heard the shooting from 2d Squad, he had persuaded Garcia to allow him to call in a Hellfire shot. Myers and Spokes Beardsley, back at Inkerman, were immensely pleased with themselves. Sergeant Dy couldn’t believe the size of Harvest Hawk; it looked like a Martian spaceship.

After the firing stopped, Hawk spotted men carrying away three bodies. Uncertain whether they were Taliban or sympathetic farmers, Hawk let them live.

Three miles to the south, the battalion lost another Marine. An IED tore into Cpl. Christopher Montgomery, tearing off his legs and left hand and lancing his stomach with shrapnel. Before succumbing in the hospital, he told his mother, “
God has a plan for me. I don’t know what it is yet, but there’s a plan, and whatever it is, I will fulfill it.”

Back at Fires, there was a change in squad leaders during the first week in December. Sergeant Thoman was promoted to staff sergeant and moved to Transformer to take over as the platoon sergeant. Sgt. Philip McCulloch took over 3rd Squad. It was his second chance to show he had the right stuff. From Galveston, Texas, he had a rough upbringing and tended to be too hard on his men. Before the company had deployed to Afghanistan, he had been transferred from 3rd Platoon and assigned to company headquarters.

A month earlier, Mac had been riding in a Humvee that was hit by two rocket-propelled grenades. The first exploded, thrusting the truck sideways. The second grenade pierced partway through the armor and stopped next to Mac’s face, failing to detonate. After a few days in the hospital, he convinced the doctors to let him return to the company. Now he was back with 3rd Platoon, anxious to prove his worth.

On December 8, he led 3rd Squad on a routine patrol. A kilometer north of Fires, a few Taliban shot at them. The patrol gave chase. A few more Taliban joined in, shooting from the west. The Marines hit one, but when they bounded forward, the gang to the north let loose a fusillade of bullets. The squad kept coming, hitting a second man before the others reached a far tree line. Now two kilometers from base, Mac called for mortar support and pushed after the gang, slowed by carrying their fallen comrade.