One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (4 page)

In the cornfields, two separate groups of Marines and scattered enemy groups were maneuvering out of sight of one another. Bullets were zipping by from different angles. It was hard to tell who was firing at whom. But there hadn’t been any friendly casualties and the enemy fire had slackened by the time Johnson’s squad reached the other Marines. Running low on ammo, they decided to head west back to Patrol Base Fires by wading across a waist-deep canal.

Johnson’s squad took up the rear. When Johnson’s men reached the road paralleling the canal, the enemy unleashed a fusillade of machine gun fire. The Marines flopped down and LCpl. Alec Catherwood landed on a pressure plate. The blast hurled him into the canal, smashing apart his rifle and driving the red-hot barrel deep into Johnson’s left thigh.

Improvised Explosive Devices—IEDs—were fiendishly simple. Despite entreaties from Washington to use other readily available chemicals, Pakistan persisted in manufacturing ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer then smuggled into Afghanistan. The insurgents mixed the nitrate, which acted as the oxidizer, with fuel and packed the gummy substance into plastic jugs. A blasting cap the size of a firecracker was attached to a few feet of wire, with the open end glued to a piece of wood. A wire on another piece of wood was wrapped at one end around a flashlight battery. The two pieces of wood were taped together with the wires facing each other, kept apart by a slice of sponge. The jug, wires, battery, and parallel pieces of wood were buried in the dirt. When the weight of a foot pressed the boards and wires together, a spark leaped from the battery to the blasting cap, setting off ten pounds of nitrate that ripped apart legs, testicles, intestines, and chests.

Abbate unfolded the black tourniquet strap and wrapped it around Johnson’s soaked trouser. He threaded the strap back through the plastic buckle, pulled the strap tight, grabbed the knob, and twisted to tighten the strap. The pain jolted through Johnson, who struggled to get up.

“Let me up,” he muttered. “Gotta get this shit organized.”

A grunt can cinch up a tourniquet in his sleep. It’s an automatic reflex. When the blood is gushing and severed legs are twitching and the smoke is blinding and the screaming is too loud to hear—that’s when the tourniquet must be applied. Abbate twisted the tourniquet tighter, pushing Johnson’s face down so that he couldn’t see the blood gushing from his shattered leg.

“Don’t look, bro,” he said.

Cpl. Jacob Ruiz, carrying the radio for the sniper section, hustled over. Ruiz, twenty-five, from California, was calm and efficient.

“Call for medevac,” Abbate said. “Urgent.”

After sending the message, Ruiz heard a
pfzz
ing noise and glanced up to see the black shape of a rocket whizzing past. He looked down a corn row and locked eyes with two men, each holding a grenade launcher. One, wearing a brown man-dress and a kapul (flat hat), ducked back, while the other, in a dirty blue man-dress, stood his ground. Ruiz dropped the handset and swung up his M4 rifle. The man was too quick, darting into the corn.

The explosive concussion had knocked two other Marines into the canal. In shock amid the carnage, many did not return fire. That’s the killer in a firefight. If you don’t keep shooting, no matter how wildly, your enemy moves freely to a spot where he can finish you off. As General Patton put it, “to halt under fire and not fire back is suicide.” With scant return fire, the Taliban were dodging safely from spot to spot in the shallow ditches among the tree lines. Amid the smoke and dust, the enemy pressed forward.

Abbate ran up and down the canal road, ignoring the bullets and the IEDs lurking underfoot, urging the Marines to return fire. He grabbed one man after another, pulling each into a firing position and assigning a sector of fire.

“When you see dust,” he yelled, “spray it down.”

Occasionally he paused to aim in with his Mark 11 sniper rifle, snapping off a few quick shots. Once he had set up a base of fire, he paused and looked around. Two Marines were floundering in the canal, trying to keep Catherwood’s head above water. Alec Catherwood, nineteen, from Illinois, had wanted to be a Marine
since he was three. He was engaged to be married in July. This was his first deployment and his first firefight.

Abbate leaped in and the three pulled Catherwood onto the bank. Catherwood wasn’t breathing and his lips had turned blue. His left arm had been sheared off by the blast and his body had gone into shock. As his blood poured out, his body heat drained away. The sudden drop in temperature prevented his blood from clotting, enabling more blood to spill into the dirt. The lethal combination of lactic acid buildup and lower blood pressure eventually throws the heart out of rhythm. Abbate helped cinch tight a tourniquet and yelled for Marines to try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, knowing that death hovered a minute away.

Back at Kilo Company’s ops center, frustration reigned. A dozen Marines huddled around the radios; there was nothing they could do. Another squad had already left Fires to help, and the 81mm mortars at Inkerman were firing. Amid the background clunk of outgoing mortar shells, those in the ops center could only listen to the screams over the radio.

At the scene of the fight, Abbate was checking on the wounded. Ruiz was still aiding Johnson, the chunk of rifle barrel still soldered deep into his mangled left thigh.

“You’re going to make it,” Abbate said. “We’ll get you out of here.”

Johnson remembered being thrown into the air. He thought his friend had caught him.

Some of the enemy had forded the canal farther to the north and were attacking the Marines’ right flank, trying to cut off their route back to Fires. Abbate ran over to Cpl. Royce Hughie, who was covering the eastern approach with his squad automatic weapon. A SAW spews 800 rounds a minute; that volume of bullets melds into a glowing red laser beam slicing in half anything in its path. As Hughie shifted around, a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) shot out of the corn, struck the ground in front of him, and spun to a stop without exploding. Hughie shoved the SAW’s bipod into the mud and hosed down the fields to the north.

Abbate ran back down the road, with bullets zipping in different directions, to see after Catherwood. Doc Swartz looked up and shook his head.

“I can’t revive him,” he said. “He’s dead.”

Shells from the mortars back at Inkerman were exploding to the north. The Taliban responded with RPGs, some direct shots through the corn and most lofted at an angle. Corn stalks were smoldering and the battlefield was thick with smoke. Over the next twenty minutes, under supporting fire by Hughie, all of the Marines moved back across the canal.

Seeking cover, LCpl. Joseph Lopez ran toward a compound designated House 3 on the leaders’ photomaps. A concussion wave swept over Abbate and Swartz, followed by a sharp
bang!
and a swirl of black smoke. Lopez, twenty-six, from Rosamond, California, had absorbed the full force of the explosion.

Instinctively, Cpl. Sloan Hicks started toward Lopez. Abbate grabbed him.

“No!” he shouted. “Stay off that goddamn path!”

The Taliban had dug in IEDs along the banks of the canal, on the few trails, and in the courtyards. Marines were screaming back and forth, no one daring to move. Despite what he had just told Hicks, Abbate stood up, ignored the incoming fire, ran at full speed back to Ruiz, and grabbed the handset.

“We have multiple cas from a second IED,” he radioed to Fires. “Too many to carry back. Direct the helos in here.”

Doc Swartz was running past Abbate, toward the wounded near House 3. Another flash, another concussion wave, another patch of black smoke. Doc was down, with both legs blown off.

“Freeze!” Abbate screamed at the spread-out Marines. “No one else move. Get that Vallon up here!”

The engineer trained to use the metal detector was in shock. Three successive blasts had struck down four Marines behind him and three more in front of him. He refused to move. When Abbate yelled at him a second time, he responded by pitching his Vallon forward.

Abbate crawled over and picked it up. He had no idea how to read a small quiver of the needle. He faked it, standing erect and slowly walking to Doc Swartz, scuffing his feet to leave marks for the others to follow. He kept going for about twenty meters until he reached a spot where the dirt was caked as hard as concrete, safe from any IED. Then he threw the Vallon to Hughie, who was holding the dying Lopez.

Joseph Lopez had joined the Marines to “find his way.” He read the Bible daily and Johnson, his squad leader, had
trusted his judgment. Before deploying, he told his father, “I know God, and if anything happens to me, I want you to tell my Mom I’m okay.”

Together, Sergeant Dy, as everyone called him, and Sergeant Abbate carried first Lopez and then Doc Swartz to the safe ground.
There were now three wounded who urgently needed blood transfusions, plus one dying and one dead Marine.

“Sergeant Abbate,” Ruiz yelled, “helos inbound in five mikes!”

Abbate again took the Vallon and walked through the soft dirt for about fifty meters to an open spot where the helicopters could land. As the wounded and dead were carried to the landing zone, he realized the northwest flank was unguarded. He ran back along the path he had cleared, grabbed three Marines, and led them forward to cover the flank.

As soon as the
whump-whump
of helicopter blades could be heard, LCpl. Willie Deel saw a farmer in a brown man-dress dart out of a cornfield, pointing upward with an RPG. Seeing Deel aim in at him, the man ducked back into the corn. From the other side of a minefield, the Taliban could shoot carefully as the helos fluttered down. The enemy intensified their machine gun fire.

There wasn’t time to find a route through the irrigation ditches to attack from the flank, and to slowly sweep a path with the Vallon across the field guaranteed being hit. LCpl. Mario Launder, a fire team leader, watched as Abbate picked up his rifle, scrambled up the canal bank, and without looking back headed out into the field toward the enemy position. After advancing several meters, Abbate realized he was alone. He stopped, turned around, and shouted.

“Let’s go! We all die together!”

Launder’s squad leaped up and moved behind him.

Seeing the Marines running toward them, the enemy slipped into a shallow canal and pulled back. No IEDs exploded. Perhaps none had been set in the field, or maybe the Marines were just plain lucky.

With only a few bullets incoming, two helos landed in fast succession and took off with the casualties. One helo was diverted to pick up the body of LCpl. Irvin
Ceniceros, twenty-one, from Alaska, killed in another fight a few kilometers south.

After the medevac birds left, Abbate grabbed a machine gun and
took up post as the rear guard. He was the last man to reenter the wire back at Patrol Base Fires.

That wasn’t the end of it. The Taliban had blown a sluice gate a few hundred meters to the west, allowing a tributary from the Helmand River to flood in. The fields outside PB Fires were chest-deep in water. By late afternoon, the rising water was lapping inside the wire. With the fort almost underwater, the Taliban crept closer, shooting from all sides. The Marines furiously returned fire. They sent out a patrol to flank the enemy to the east. The Taliban easily avoided them, while maintaining constant fire. When the patrol returned to Fires and ammunition was redistributed, the defenders were down to one magazine per rifle.

Back at Inkerman, Capt. Nick Johnson organized an emergency working party.

“Everybody not on watch,” LCpl. Jaspar Jones, who was at the headquarters, said, “went on that working party. We had to get ammo out to Fires. All of us wanted to help.”

They loaded the munitions into a truck and drove until it mired down. Then they strapped ammo boxes on their backs and trudged forward. Captain Johnson toted one hundred pounds of .50 caliber ammo by himself. By the third trip, he was exhausted. For three hours, the working party staggered, slipped, and slid in thigh-deep mud from the truck to the fort. When they could carry no more individually, they slung the ammo boxes on poles, shouldered by two of them.