One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (18 page)

“
I’m honored to say we didn’t lose him to a gang fight,” his cousin said. “We didn’t lose him to an overdose. We lost him in an honorable way, defending his country.”

Day 72. 432,000 Steps

Two days before Christmas, 3rd Squad came across a group of men and boys idling by the side of a trail. This wasn’t unusual. The men worked less than the women and often sat around, chatting with each other. This group had several batteries and cell phones. Sergeant McCulloch pitched the batteries into a canal, used the HIDE handheld computer to take their pictures and names, and signaled to the engineer, LCpl. Colbey Yazzie, to move out.

Yaz was a thickset, twenty-one-year-old Navajo with a bright smile, a diffident manner, and iron will. His father had served in the Army, and Yaz planned to return to the reservation in Nevada. He said he wanted to work in a mine with his uncle, but no one in 3rd Platoon saw that happening. Yaz liked San Diego and Laguna Beach too much.

LCpl. Arden Buenagua, killed by an IED on patrol with Lieutenant Schumacher a month earlier, had been Yaz’s best friend. Yet day after day, Yaz took point, refusing to flinch at the death waiting under his feet. Third Platoon had a mystical faith in Yaz, who could smell IEDs.

As Yaz was moving northeast on the path, he “
got a bad feeling.” He probed the ground with his knife and uncovered a thick lamp wire. Following the wire for several feet, he found it was attached to two IEDs—thirty pounds of explosives packed in a Crock-Pot and ten pounds in a plastic jug. Two separate pressure plates were waiting to rip apart the Marines.

“My buddy Arden Buenagua deserves the credit,” Yazzie told me. “He found ten IEDs in our first two weeks in country. He taught me what I know.”

Later that day, a sniper from India Company, patrolling with 3rd Platoon, stepped on a pressure plate, losing his foot.

A few tree lines away and an hour later, 2d Squad shot a teenager. The distraught mother ran up, screaming, “Why did you kill my boy?” In response, Sergeant Dy held up the son’s AK, gave her some money, and moved on.

Back in the States on Christmas Eve, LCpl. Kenny Corzine, twenty-three, of Bethalto, llinois, died of wounds suffered in an IED blast earlier in the month.

“
We are all family,” his pastor, Phil Schneider, said. “This is our
son, our brother, our friend. His sacrifice was not in vain. His sacrifice has strengthened our community, our nation and our pride.”

On Christmas Day, Cpl. Jeff Sibley, back at Fires after recovering from his gunshot wound, hitched a ride to company headquarters at Inkerman. He had a long talk with his wife, who was about to give birth to their daughter, Aubrey.

“Sergeant Dy had been born on Christmas,” Sibley said. “He told me to make June 25 Aubrey’s half birthday, so she’d get presents like other kids. I thought that was cool, because I’d be home by June.”

I can’t get my mind around living in two worlds. Back in Vietnam, when Marines went into the bush, that’s all there was. We lived on the other side of the moon. One day in 1967 in my old village of Binh Nghia, when the squad was under the command of Sgt. Vinnie McGowan, the four-star admiral in charge of the entire Pacific theater dropped in by helicopter. Vinnie’s team had been pressed hard and had fought well. With the cool of a West Sider from New York City, he showed the admiral his tiny fort, answered a few questions, saluted at the end of the ten-minute fly-by, and forgot about it.

Not so fast. An old-school gentleman, the admiral handwrote a note to Vinnie’s parents, praising their brave son. You can imagine the rest. Mrs. McGowan, having not heard in weeks from dear Vinnie, dropped the official envelope on the floor and called Mr. McGowan. Also expecting the worst, he raced home, read the admiral’s praise and wrote Sergeant McGowan a blistering response. For the next six months, every member of Vinnie’s team wrote their wives or parents at least once a week.

Out in the bush, one-way communications to home is hard enough. How grunts handle Skype calls, hearing about the Oscars or
overdue bills or homework, well, God bless them. As an old grunt, that is beyond my ken.

Also on Christmas Day, Rausch, who threw the red smoke to help a wounded comrade on Thanksgiving Day, happened to be at battalion headquarters when General Amos flew in.

“You’ve been in a hell of a fight,” the Commandant said. “The least I can do is come out here.”

The next day, Rausch returned to 3rd Platoon, proudly showing off a medallion the Commandant had given him. The rumor was if you slapped down that coin inside a bar in the States, someone was sure to buy you a drink. Rausch, twenty, would have to wait a year before testing the rumor, if he got home.

In a Christmas letter to the families of 3/5, Lieutenant Colonel Morris wrote, “
The bottom line is that we are hurting the enemy and concurrently doing everything we can to help the Afghan people choose to support their national government over the Taliban.”

The Marines were dying in the fields of Sangin. But there was no indication the people of Sangin would ever support their government
in opposition to the Taliban.

On December 28, 3/5 lost another Marine, Cpl. Tevan Nguyen, twenty-one, of Hutto, Texas. He left behind a three-month-old son.

“
He didn’t drink, he never smoked and he believed in prayer,” his cousin said. “He always made you smile.”

By January, the two-week-old cease-fire in Kilo’s area was breaking down. The unwritten agreement between the governor of Helmand and the Alakozai tribe proved too good to be true. Rather than leave the area, the Taliban had brought in reinforcements.

“
We’ve reassured them [the Alakozai tribe],” Mills said, “that we’re going to be here for them, that we’re not going to abandon them.”

However, the Marines were certain to abandon them. President Obama had already informed his commanders of the time limit. Before sending in the Marines, President Obama met with his top commanders. According to journalist and historian Jonathan Alter, Obama asked General Petraeus, “
I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in eighteen months?”

At the time, Petraeus was in charge of the Central Command, the Middle East theater that included Afghanistan.

“Sir, I’m confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame,” Petraeus replied.

“If you can’t do the things you say you can in eighteen months,” Obama said, “then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?”

“Yes sir, in agreement,” Petraeus said.

As of January 2011, those eighteen months had expired, and Petraeus had replaced McChrystal as the commander in Afghanistan. Both remained ardent advocates of the COIN strategy of nation building. But by 2011, President Obama had lost faith in the strategy. He ordered the slow but complete withdrawal of American forces. The Marines at Sangin might be the last in the queue to leave, but leave they would.

The Afghan forces were spotty at best. The Afghan army commander in Sangin, Captain Ahmed, was solid. He exhorted his men to fight. But the Afghan soldiers were few and dispirited. The police were worse. They never ventured out of the district square and had not made a single arrest since 3/5 had arrived. The National Directorate for Security agents were better, but not by much. On paper, the NDS was supposed be a combination of the FBI, Texas Rangers, and state troopers—tough, dedicated guys. During December alone, 3/5 had detained fourteen suspects, including two caught with IEDs. Two were sent to the provincial jail. The NDS quietly released the other twelve.

During the Christmas cease-fire, the local Taliban had remained unified and obedient to their seniors in Pakistan. Browning’s sniper section, scoping the fields around Fires, reported that some farmers weren’t responding to greetings and waves from passing Taliban. But the farmers hadn’t gestured for them to leave. Rather than allowing the Alakozai to expel the insurgents, the cease-fire had enabled the enemy to regroup and bring fresh supplies into Kilo Company’s area.

On New Year’s Day, Colonel Kennedy ended the Christmas cease-fire. When I asked him about it, Kennedy shrugged. Despite nice words and solemn promises, he hadn’t seen any change on the ground. So it was back to war.

The confidence of the local Taliban had been shaken. They had been pummeled in the Thanksgiving fight. Since then and despite the Tactical Directive, 3rd Platoon had become more self-assured in calling for air. Spokes Beardsley consistently came through, and Mad Dog Myers had an easy, if high-decibel relationship with the gunship pilots.

The local Taliban had complained to their high command in Pakistan: “Why don’t you come over here to fight them!” The battalion staff referred to these as small-t Taliban, meaning locals and part-timers who rushed back into the fields to harvest poppy, with the drug dealers paying $10 a day. The Taliban was an amoeba drawn from a hundred Pashtun subtribes with dozens of different motivations. Afghan loyalties ran from the family to the clan to the tribe. In Sangin and a hundred other districts, the part-time wannabes took orders from the “made-men” within the local Mafia-like franchise that reported to the top council or shura, ninety miles away in Quetta, Pakistan.

The top boss there, Mullah Zakir, had been released from Guantánamo prison in 2007. During the 2010 cease-fire, Zakir responded to the pleas from Sangin by sending two or three dozen big-T hardened fighters from Pakistan. This followed the sensible procedure explained nearly two centuries earlier by Clausewitz in his classic book,
On War
.

“
A commander can more easily shape,” Clausewitz wrote, “and direct the popular insurrection by supporting the insurgents with small units of the regular army. Without these regular troops to provide
encouragement, the local inhabitants will usually lack the confidence and initiative to take to arms.”

Third Platoon sensed an immediate difference in enemy tactics. It was standard for the Marines, once they took fire from one direction, to flank that position. Now, whenever they flanked, they took fire from another angle. Instead of one PKM machine gun supported by two to four AKs, there were two PKMs, each covering the most predictable route toward the other. And with the ammunition resupply from Pakistan, Garcia couldn’t rely on the Taliban pulling back after the initial exchange of fire.

The Taliban gangs, with the fighters from Pakistan sprinkled among them, began shooting at odd times and odd places. If someone supplies the bullets, enthusiastic teenagers stake out home turf by firing their rifles. Even when ordered not to do so, they can’t resist pulling the trigger just to hear the noise and feel the recoil. It makes no difference whether you’re in Vietnam in 1966, or Iraq in 2005, or Afghanistan in 2011; the local insurgents will always take potshots at a passing patrol. It seems silly, a testosterone thing, but it happens worldwide.

Halfway through its seven-month tour,
the 800-man battalion had taken over 200 casualties. Over 500 IEDs had been found, and about another one hundred had exploded.

Of the 136 Marines in Kilo Company, nine had been killed and forty-five wounded. Even with some replacements, the company was down to ninety-six men, a reduction of 30 percent. Another dozen were banged up but refused medical aid above the company level. Like football players, they rejected by silence the very concept of traumatic brain injury. IED explosions were something you shook off. You saw that big white light, your peripheral vision had jagged zigzags, a fast movement caused a flick of pain around your forehead,
and then after a week or so, you were back to normal. You were dinged, but all grunts are dinged. No problem for twenty or forty years, or maybe never.
Back to work.

Every platoon in 3/5 was waging a straight war of attrition, exchanging American for Afghan lives. If the Marines killed enough Taliban, the Afghan army might—
might
—have the self-confidence to take over. The hope—
hope
—was that Afghan officials would then gain the support of the people, who would turn against the Taliban, many of whom belonged to their own families.

Strategy is the application of resources to achieve a goal. Attrition wasn’t a true strategy, because its success depended upon Afghan actions that the Americans did not control. The Americans could not select, promote, or even tell Afghan officials what to do.

The grunts in 3rd Platoon were pushing the edge of the risk envelope. In ten weeks, one in three in the platoon had been killed, lost a limb, or evacuated with gunshot or shrapnel wounds. In eighty-two days, they had found seventy-five IEDs and engaged the enemy about forty times. Altogether, the platoon members had seen about 150 Taliban and killed a few dozen, in addition to sniper kills of over thirty. Even allowing for double-counting, this is heavy stuff. You leave the wire, you get shot at, you see a spurt of flame, you shoot back, you hear a
crump!
and screaming, you taste that sandpaper grit on your teeth … you’re in it.

In Sangin, don’t bat an eye walking past women and kids hacking at mud clods like it’s the Middle Ages. Watch the tree lines, and pour out hell at the first tiny sliver of red flame. Listen to Garcia, Esquibel, Deykeroff, and McCulloch. When the dirt spurts up in front of your eyes, don’t flinch. You’re a grunt. Don’t ask questions about the idiotic mission. Your job is to pull the trigger, keep your humanity, avoid Leavenworth, and support your insane buddies.

Conflicting Visions

The counterinsurgency doctrines in Afghanistan and Vietnam were polar opposites in emphasis.

In Vietnam, focus was upon defeating the enemy. After the war, in 1980, the Marines published a field manual that emphasized this:
“Concentrate on destruction or neutralization of the enemy force, not on terrain.”
That objective carried over into Helmand.

“
We need to challenge the enemy where he thinks he has strength,” four-star Marine Gen. James Conway said. “There’s no place in a zone where we’re not going to go.”