One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (26 page)

“Sergeant Esquibel?” Palma was shouting. “Esquibel, where are you?”

It had been a low-order detonation. Esquibel saw the yellow jug split open next to him, packed with explosives. Palma stood on the bank and looked down.

“Don’t touch off secondaries,” Esquibel said. “Fuck. How much is left of me?”

Palma looked at the mud-splattered figure.

“Looks like only a leg is gone. You’re okay.”

Palma’s sympathy wasn’t particularly reassuring. As tourniquets were applied, Garcia hustled over. It appeared to him that Esquibel would lose his foot, but not his leg. The sergeant who had taken such special care of his men hadn’t made it to the end of his last tour. As the helicopter approached, a Marine threw a smoke grenade to mark their position.

“I see no smoke,” the pilot said. “I won’t land until you pop that damn smoke.”

The field was filled with bright green cannabis plants. Even the mist floating over the field was green.

“What knucklehead,” Garcia yelled, “threw a green smoke grenade?”

Day 166. One Million Steps

The next day, March 27, Lantznester was talking with Yaz, who was taking point on another patrol. Yaz had woken up out of sorts, and heading back up to sector P8Q did not raise his spirits. Third Platoon
was turning over Fires next week and he had passed the one hundred patrol mark. This stuff was getting old.

“I think someone’s hunting me,” Yaz said.

“Dude,” Lantz said, “you’ll be fine.”

A few hours later, Yazzie cautiously approached the long tree line marking the entrance to sector P8Q. Yaz had disliked this route since January, when the monstrous slug from a Dishka, a Russian heavy machine gun, had just missed him. With Doyle keeping watch behind him, Yaz decided to lead McCulloch’s squad through a field rather than along a hard-packed trail.

Seeing a wire protruding from the dirt, he signaled the squad to halt. He knelt down on his right leg, extended his right arm, and began to shove away the loose dirt, as he had done a hundred times before. The pressure plate was so sensitive that the weight of his hand closed the circuit between the two wires.

Wham!
The force of the explosion flipped Yaz’s body upside down in the air and he landed on his back, looking up at the sky. He lay still, hoping his back wasn’t broken. But his right leg kept twisting and quivering.

“What the hell?” he screamed. “What the hell!”

Doyle was kneeling over him, his face inches away.

“Don’t worry, bro,” he said. “We got you.”

Badly concussed, Doyle was wobbling, trying not to lose consciousness as he helped his friend.

“Straighten out my leg,” Yaz said. “It’s caught on something.”

The corpsman was hitting him with morphine. The last thing he remembered was McCulloch patting him on the shoulder.

“It’s okay. We fixed your leg. It’s okay.”

Yazzie’s right leg, mangled beyond repair, was amputated a few hours later.

That same day on another patrol, Corpsman Redmond Ramos stepped on another pressure plate and lost his foot.

“That IED maker had been watching us,” Yaz told me from his hospital room. “He saw I never used that trail. He was real smart.”

In the Vietnam village where I served, the top fighter was Suong, the leader of the farmer militia. Suong had started fighting in 1964, and no Marine could match his tactical instincts. One night in 1974, years after we had left, Suong opened a gate in his hamlet and was blown apart. After a thousand patrols, the odds had caught up with him.

Third Platoon went into Sangin with fifty-one Marines, and concluded the tour with twenty-seven casualties—two killed, nine amputations, and sixteen concussions, shrapnel, or gunshot wounds.

LCpl. Colbey Yazzie was the magician and platoon talisman, too skilled to be struck down. Amputated leg. Lt. Cameron West had spent his life in the outdoors, too smart to be fooled. Amputated leg. Sgt. Dominic Esquibel was a meticulous man, careful to a fault. Amputated foot. Sgt. Matt Abbate was the Achilles of the platoon, its finest warrior. Dead. Over the course of one million steps, the odds will always catch up.

In April of 2011, Battalion 3/5 left Sangin. A fresh platoon moved into Fires and spent a week conducting joint operations. On the first patrol, Vic Garcia brought Lt. Chuck Poulton, the new platoon commander, up to P8Q. When a gunfight broke out, Garcia called in Cobra gunships.

“That’s how it is out here,” Garcia said. “Use your supporting arms. Don’t let them breathe.”

It was a confusing command environment. When briefing reporters, the high command quietly took credit for urging Special Operations teams to kill more Taliban. But the conventional forces were more restricted.

“
I put out a memo [in May of 2011],” Petraeus said, “re-familiarizing all forces with the Tactical Directive.”

A year earlier, the Marines had sensed that Petraeus was not going to enforce the Tactical Directive strictly. Over the intervening months, he had gradually relied more on the Special Operations teams to attrite the Taliban. Fire restrictions on conventional forces who were viewed as community organizers again tightened.

Despite the Tactical Directive, Poulton, who had done a combat tour in Iraq, adopted Garcia’s tactics. Every patrol moved by bounds in single file, watched over by a base of fire with a machine gun, 203s, and a forward observer. At first, action was slow. It was the poppy season, the fields were ablaze with purple blooms, and the Taliban were helping with the harvest on their farms.

A few months later, though, when the fields were thick with summer corn, the gunfights and IED explosions resumed. One day in June, the platoon found eight motorbikes hidden in a corn row. After the Marines waited in ambush for several hours, ten Afghans came by, carrying shovels and showing clean hands. Chemical swabs revealed gunpowder residue on all. The district governor, claiming a lack of evidence, released them.

The war ground on. Eventually, Poulton’s platoon sergeant, all three squad leaders, and the company commander were wounded. His platoon suffered two Marines killed and thirty-two wounded.

Back in the States, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates concluded his four years of service in June of 2011. He told President Obama that the commanders in the field believed we were achieving success.

“
The more time you spend in Afghanistan,” he told Mr. Obama, “the closer to the front you get, the more optimistic people are.”

Lieutenant Poulton was not one of those optimistic people.

“We took over Fires and held it,” Poulton said. “We’re Marines. I’m proud of what we did. But we didn’t blame the people for our losses. We were leaving Afghanistan and the Taliban were staying.”

His battalion—1/5—had uncovered 895 IEDs, considerably fewer than the 1,315 reported by 3/5.

“We made progress,” the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Tom Savage, said. “Still, Marines are bad for the poppy business, bad for the Taliban, and bad for some tribes. Will Afghan soldiers from tribes in the north take on Sangin as their fight? That’s the key question.”

Patrol Base Fires was closed down. The Marines were thinning out their units, and the Afghan soldiers laughed at the suggestion that they remain alone in the middle of the Green Zone.

In September of 2011, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment (1/7) took over from 1/5. I returned to Sangin. With the American withdrawal well under way, 1/7 was holding Sangin with half the number of troops that 3/5 had deployed.

The morning after my return, I accompanied a dozen Marines from B Company, each carrying ninety pounds of armor and gear, as they slogged through stifling cornfields in ninety-five degree heat. We headed for sector Q5H, where Lieutenant Donnelly had been killed. No Afghan soldiers accompanied the Marines. They were staying inside their bases away from the Green Zone until the corn was harvested.

When a four-foot cobra slithered across our path, the Marines shrugged; a snake couldn’t blow off their legs. The patrol emerged from the cornfield in front of a small madras, or Islamist school. A black-turbaned mullah quickly herded the schoolboys inside the courtyard, while a dozen farmers glared at us.

We walked on, eventually reaching a tiny outpost called Pabst Blue Ribbon. Inside PBR, a dozen Marines and local Afghan militia were relaxing, overseen by a sentry with a machine gun. Such was the distrust that all Afghans handed in their weapons before entering the post. With no interpreter, the Americans and Afghans could only
nod at one another. Although every Marine post and patrol was “partnered,” the Afghans were learning little they could apply on their own.

We pushed on. Staff Sgt. Edward Marini, the lead engineer, uncovered and blew up two wooden pressure plates attached to yellow plastic jugs filled with ammonium nitrate. In six months, Bravo Company had uncovered seventy-seven IEDs and taken ten wounded. This tally was far fewer than in the previous year, proof that the Marines had largely cleared Sangin of active enemy.

Once the two IEDs were detonated, the platoon commander, Lt. Kurt Hoening, faced a choice.

“We’ll get into a fight in Q5H,” he said to me. “That means we come back down this path at dusk, and there’ll be fresh IEDs waiting for us. I’m not risking my men to get into a fight that has no meaning.”

Hoening had not yet been in a firefight that qualified him to wear the prestigious Combat Action Ribbon that symbolized a combat veteran. He placed the safety of his men above his own career advancement.

Back at base, he asked me to say a few words to his Marines, who were questioning what they were accomplishing out there on their own.

I thanked the Marines. It was an honor to have taken my last combat patrol with the battalion I had joined fifty years earlier. They might question what they were doing at the end of the earth where the farmers and enemies looked the same, and often were the same.

In Vietnam, I had fought a similar confusing war. But people and nations don’t long remember policies. Marines have fought in 160 campaigns. Even historians can’t remember the policy reasons for many of them. Policy is not the point.

You volunteered for the Marine Corps not to make policy, but to guard our nation. Marines fight wherever our commander-in-chief orders us to go. Your grandchildren will one day ask, Did you fight in Afghanistan? You will proudly say yes. You’ve had an extraordinary adventure, not shared by your peers back home. Some of your brothers were killed or lost limbs. You all knew that was the cost before you volunteered. Your fallen brothers would volunteer again.

The task of the grunt is to defeat any foe on the battlefield. Put him six feet under. Guard our nation so fiercely that no one wants to fight America.

Everyone wants recognition for a hard job done well. In 2011, 3rd Platoon had borne the hardest of the fighting. Most of the platoon told me they wished the people back home could understand the toils of the grunt. It may be of some comfort to them to know that their most famous platoon mate—Cpl. E. B. Sledge—felt that exact same way in 1945.

“
As I strolled the streets of Mobile, civilian life seemed so strange,” Sledge wrote. “People rushed around in a hurry about seemingly insignificant things. Few seemed to realize how blessed they were to be free and untouched by the horrors of war. To them, a veteran was a veteran—all were the same, whether one man had survived the deadliest combat or another had pounded a typewriter while in uniform.”

When he enrolled at Auburn University in 1946, a clerk in the Registrar’s Office asked him if the Marines taught him anything useful. Sledge replied, “
Lady, there was a
killing
war. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill Japs and try to survive. Now, if that don’t fit into any academic course, I’m sorry. But some of us had to do the killing—and most of my buddies got killed or wounded.”

Back in the States, Lieutenant Colonel Morris visited the families of the fallen in the summer of 2011.

“
Some were very angry,” he told NPR, “yelling, why the hell did I lose their sons for this? What do you say? That his son died doing what he wanted to be doing and that he had a positive impact on the people of Afghanistan.”

The unit patch of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment is a red-and-yellow shield. In one quadrant is the fleur-de-lis symbol of knighthood, bestowed by France after 3/5 stopped the 1918 German advance on Paris through Belleau Wood. Another quadrant is decorated with a line of green bamboo shoots, symbolizing the jungles of Vietnam. Atop the shield is a banner inscribed with the name “Darkhorse,” the radio call sign during the battle at the “Frozen Chosin” Reservoir in 1950. On the bottom of the shield is printed the battalion motto: “Get Some”—an infelicitous reminder that the task of the infantryman is to kill the enemy.

In the past decade, 3/5 had six recipients of the Navy Cross, our nation’s second highest award for valor. This was the highest number in any Army or Marine battalion. In August of 2012, I attended the Navy Cross ceremony at Camp Pendleton, California, for Sgt. Matt Abbate. Most of Matt’s sniper section and 3rd Platoon were there, together with a thousand others. The stories of Matt had entered Marine folklore. Like Corporal Sledge, he was now a member of the
Old Breed whose story would be told in boot camp.