One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (24 page)

Later that day, in sector P8T, Palma was hacking a path through thick vines—standard 1st Squad take-the-toughest-way procedure. The squad was trying to sneak up on three Taliban that an F-18, call sign Maker 32, was tracking. The situation was a bizarre combination of seventeenth-century Indian tactics and twenty-first-century technology. To stalk a man who made $200 a year,
the squad was listening over a $17,000 radio to directions from a pilot in a $40 million aircraft circling 10,000 feet above them. The hunt ended when Yazzie detected an IED. During the time it took him to disarm the pressure plate, the F-18 lost track of the prey.

The squad was carrying a new radio detection device, code name Wolfhound. Stevie, the interpreter, translated the enemy chatter he was picking up.

“My bag [of IEDs] is full. Where do you want me to go?”

“Dig it in anywhere. You are safe. No one is behind you.”

“Be careful of 3rd Platoon. They are snipers.”

Both sides developed standard tactical procedures. Now that the fighters from Pakistan had settled in, the Taliban usually fired from two or three directions so that the Marines could not freely maneuver. IEDs were buried at all likely crossing points between tree lines and canals. The enemy moved in gangs of three to six and shot from long distances, most gunfights lasted less than ten minutes, and at the sound of an approaching helicopter, the shooters ran safely away using the cover of irrigation ditches and tree lines.

The Taliban were good tacticians. They adapted quickly. The Sangin nizami, or commissioners, had readily accepted the Pakistani fighters and insisted on zakat, or training, for two weeks for each fighting band in the district. But after the Thanksgiving battle, the Taliban did not mass again.

It was a squad war. Each squad, reinforced with two engineers, a machine gun crew, and a few snipers, went out alone. Following the point man with the Vallon, the Marines walked at a snail’s pace across the open fields. A mortar would wreak devastation among the exposed Marines. Fortunately, the Taliban did not purchase mortars in the Pakistani bazaars. The tubes and shells were too heavy to smuggle in.

Garcia gave no motivating speeches. He expected the squad leader to do his job, and the squad leader expected the same of his fire team leaders.

“Every squad here at Fires is tight,” Rushton said to me. “We’re brothers. It’s like a marriage. You nag each other, saying stuff like, Don’t chew that way. But if someone in your squad cries at night, you don’t blab to another squad.”

Over the next few days in mid-January, patrols destroyed three more IEDs, two found by Yazzie. While searching one compound, they found several schoolbooks. The owner explained that he secretly taught school. The patrol hurriedly left, hoping their visit hadn’t set up the teacher for a Taliban inquisition.

First Squad was patrolling in Q1C when Sibley observed a man in a clean, light green man-dress walking nervously back and forth in a field. With Browning staying behind in a sniper hide to provide cover, the patrol headed toward the man, who ran away. Searching a nearby compound, the Marines found a rocket-propelled grenade. Two men in the compound next door said they had seen nothing.
Stevie, the translator, was convinced both were Taliban. But believing both would be released if he arrested them, Sergeant Mac simply shook his rifle at them and the patrol pushed on.

In P8Q, 3rd Squad found four IEDs, thirty pounds of explosives, and a bag of PKM brass. The empty shell casings in the bag weren’t worth a dollar, but there was a market for items of even the tiniest value.

To vary the routine, 2d Squad set up a vehicle control point in Q1D, hoping to catch the Taliban moving supplies. While standing in overwatch, Yazzie uncovered a pressure plate attached to a jug of explosives. From his vantage point, he watched as one motorcycle after another approached the checkpoint, then abruptly turned off and bumped away across the fields. A frustrated 2d Squad soon shut down the checkpoint.

“The farmers weren’t running away,” Yazzie said. “They just didn’t want to be hassled by our searches. With rain coming down every day, the Taliban weren’t moving around as much. The atmospherics were actually good.”

On January 20, Sgt. Jason Amores, twenty-nine, of Lehigh Acres, Florida, stepped on an IED and was killed. He left behind his wife, Jennifer; a son, Korbin, nine; and a daughter, Violet, three. He was the twenty-fifth member of 3/5 to die.

“I have no idea what will happen when we leave,” Vic Garcia told me. “We don’t have contact with the people. Our mission is to hunt down the enemy. I tell my platoon—all that counts is to be the best. I don’t care what the task is. Be the best at doing it.”

With February came weeks of freezing drizzle, interspersed with bursts of heavy rain. Garcia didn’t slack off the pace. Months of patrolling and searching compounds had forced the Taliban to abandon any secure base. The enemy had to keep moving as long as 3rd Platoon kept on the pressure.

For America, World War II was the defining war of the twentieth century. Seventy years ago, a strict and total draft system was in place. Males of military age were expected—and ordered—to serve. For a brief half decade, America was one big, unified, and committed community. In 1943, the draft meant that ten million men stood an equal chance of being a grunt on the front lines. The vast majority considered it a duty and an honor to serve in uniform. We call them the Greatest Generation.

But by 2010, only two million men were eligible for military service. Of those who were qualified, one in a hundred volunteered for the military. The twenty-first-century grunt belonged to the One Percent Generation.

The members of 3rd Platoon expressed the mixture of pride and resentment typical of their tiny, and from their point of view, exclusive club. After their four-year hitch, most would return to civilian life with no pension and no enhanced job skills. Society accorded them no special recognition. No one in an airport could—or perhaps should—distinguish the grunt from the many more numerous troops who served honorably in the rear.

As LCpl. Adrian Barbiera expressed it: “We do all the shit that nobody else sees.”

Day 119. 714,000 Steps

On February 8, 3rd Platoon joined with 2d Platoon at Transformer to search the sector of V3J where Lieutenant Donnelly had been killed. The Marines started at the north end of Belleau Wood. With the mangled tree line under several inches of water, the Marines methodically swept south. Searching for the waterlogged IEDs, the grunts covered less than a hundred meters per hour. Most IEDs were marked by a stack of rocks or a cloth tied to a branch. The Taliban employed obvious markings only in their own secure areas, where they expected to have advance warning. By day’s end, they had found forty-eight IEDs. Not one Marine was injured. It was the platoon’s most satisfying day in February.

During the last two weeks of the month, the platoon engaged in only one gunfight and found only five more IEDs. Due to the miserable conditions, February was the quietest period in their tour.

“The rains helped enormously,” Garcia said. “That relieved our stress when we searched. The last weeks in February, we found fifteen IEDs set in without batteries. It was too wet to wire them up. We had no intel on the human networks, or who was putting them in. But they didn’t work underwater.”

The sodden conditions enabled the shivering Marines to poke around freely. Even IEDs taped in plastic were waterlogged. On four occasions, Marines avoided losing their legs when the ignition fuses set off only low-order detonations, resulting in twisted ankles and faces white with relief.

Third Platoon attributed the decrease in fighting to the miserable weather; the high command attributed success to the counterinsurgency strategy. In February, as 3rd Platoon was sopping wet and happy about IED malfunctions, General Petraeus foresaw strategic success.

“
We have finally gotten the inputs right,” he said, “for a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy.”

By February, however, President Obama had decided that U.S. troops would steadily withdraw. The inputs were leaving.

The Marine reports supported Petraeus’s optimism. In public, Marine generals emphasized friendliness, school building, medical clinics, women’s rights, and the rule of law. Such projects and virtues would win over the Pashtun tribes and many of the insurgents. Indeed, Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, the commander of the Marines in Helmand, claimed the Taliban “
have lost the support of the people within the province.”

How the Marine command reached that conclusion was perplexing, to say the least. According to a province-wide survey,
71 percent of the people believed the Taliban would return once the American forces left. Worse, a survey in January revealed that
99 percent of those polled in Sangin believed that Marines/NATO caused all civilian casualties and that working with any NATO force was wrong.

Although money was available to pay for tips, Garcia never spent a cent in Sangin. No farmer in his right mind openly collaborated with a foreigner who would be leaving. Marines working for the Human Exploitation Team (HET)—trained intelligence agents—sometimes accompanied 3rd Platoon on patrols to recruit farmers. Most of the information they gathered was unreliable.

Amo Shuaraz, an Afghan-American from Idaho, was an undercover HET agent. He wore a Marine uniform, spoke fluent Pashto, and spent three years in southern Afghanistan. Amo was unwilling to predict what would happen when the Marines left.

“I can talk to a farmer for an hour,” he said, “and not know if he’s Talib. The Talibs lie too good.”

Day 143. 858,000 Steps

In early March, the sun and the enemy both came back out. The Taliban had dug new firing positions into the soft earth on the far side of a canal in P8Q. When 3rd Squad was fording the canal, the enemy opened up with PKM and AK fire. Mac called in the mortars, while Lance Corporal Doyle cut around to the west, forcing the Taliban to pull out. Reaching the Taliban trench line, he found only a bag of the PKM and AK brass. Third Squad spent half an hour shoveling dirt into the trench.

It was a
fuck you
gesture. Colonel Kennedy kept hammering home one line: “Finish every fight standing on the enemy’s ground.” To sweep up to the Taliban position might take Dy or Mac two hours—or Esquibel four hours—but the Taliban knew that
sooner or later the grunts were coming.

On March 5, 2d Squad went up to the northern end of P8Q. Garcia wanted to check out a cluster of abandoned compounds the Taliban had previously used as a staging area. Once inside P8Q, Dy set
up a strongpoint behind a low courtyard wall where his machine gun team had good cover and observation.

This is a good spot
, Dy thought.
If we’re shot at, we’re ready
.

Sure enough, the Taliban obliged with a burst of fire that zipped high above the wall.
The machine gun crew cheerfully unloaded against a far tree line.
Dy decided to close on the enemy, with the machine gun providing covering fire. When he lobbed a 40mm shell from his grenade launcher into the tree line, it was answered by a burst of fire from a compound off to his right.

Standard situation
, Dy thought,
the Talibs are falling back to their alternate positions
.

Through his scope, Dy could see murder holes in the compound wall and dust rising from two nearby piles of hay and timber. One Taliban leaped up, fired a burst from his AK, and then turned away to hop on his bike. Standing erect, it took him a few seconds to kick-start the motor. He went down in a fusillade of bullets.

As the enemy pulled back, dust gave away a fighting position in a pile of rubble about 300 meters distant. Lance Corporal Wagner extended the tube on an M72 light-armor rocket and waved at Sergeant Dy for permission to fire. At that range, there was one chance in a hundred of striking the small target. What the hell.

“Fuck it,” Dy shouted, “shoot the rocket!”

Wagner had set the sight to its highest elevation. Knowing that wasn’t enough, he pointed the launcher several more inches into the air and squeezed the rubber-encased igniter switch. The chunky slug of explosive lofted up in a low, slow arc. It ran out of energy just as it reached the target, exploding in a bright blink that left behind a smudge of black dust over the rubble. The squad let out a victory whoop as Dy smacked Wagner on the back of his Kevlar.

The Taliban gang again fell back, leaving behind the body of the unfortunate gunman. When Garcia called for a fire mission, the ops center asked for a sitrep.

“Six actual,” Captain Johnson radioed to Garcia. “What’s that racket we’re hearing?”

“Well, it’s 3-5,” Garcia said, referring to the third month and fifth day. “So we’re getting some.”

“Garcia,” Johnson replied, “that’s lame.”

After six months of fighting against 3rd Platoon, the Taliban had learned to keep two fields and one tree line or irrigation ditch between them and the Marines. Often they stayed two tree lines away, a distance of about 400 meters. They couldn’t hit a Marine at that distance. Unless someone was blown up by an IED and the squad was focused on the medevac, the Taliban had no desire to close with the Marines. If they miscalculated their escape route, they were in mortal danger. One sniper, Cpl. Royce Hughie, recorded three kills in a single day.

Browning, as the commander of the sniper section, repeatedly reminded the grunts to shoot a few rounds daily to make sure the aim sight of every rifle was properly aligned, called Battlefield Zero, or BZ. The average grunt, though, lacked the snap shooting skill to hit a dodging man at 300 meters. That expertise required firing thousands of rounds, and the Marines didn’t have the time or money for that investment.

By March, Browning’s sniper section had accounted for fifty-one kills, each verified by the sniper and his spotter.

“Sometimes a guy would drop like a sack of potatoes,” Sibley said. “Mostly they flinched and disappeared. I felt bad when we hit a guy in the gut and he staggered off. He might not die. Most wore black. A lot had on man-dresses.”