One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (5 page)

After the pile of ammo was waist-high, Johnson called together the sopping Marines.

“I know what you’re feeling,” he said. “Losing buddies to IEDs sucks. The Taliban believe they’ve cut you off and that we’ll leave. No way we’ll do that. In 1950, this battalion broke out of the Chosin Reservoir,
in temperatures twenty below, surrounded by thousands of Chinese. We can’t fail them. You have to stay and break out.”

Gunnery Sgt. Christopher Carlisle, imposing in stature and voice, stomped around the fort, clasping the shaken Marines by their shoulders.

“The Taliban think that flooding is going to stop us,” he yelled. “They have no idea the hell we’re going to unleash. I got your back, little brothers!”

Carlisle was enraged.

“The enemy doesn’t kill,” he screamed, “or take the limbs of any of us without paying tenfold. No one fucks with our family. We’ll drop the sledgehammer on their ass.”

Within two days of pushing into the Green Zone, Battalion 3/5 had suffered
eight killed and two dozen wounded. A British officer later said, “We warned you.” He wasn’t being mean-spirited; the British had learned that the enemy fought for every foot of ground. If you left the perimeter, you took casualties.

The Kilo Company first sergeant, Jorge Melendez, was wiry and meticulous. To him, everything had a place and an order to it. Each casualty somehow fitted into an unseen pattern.

“God,” he said, “doesn’t give you burdens you can’t carry.”

The Marines were carrying a heavy burden, their morale challenged by an enemy that was unafraid. Eventually either the Taliban would pull back or the Marines would cease to patrol. The outcome depended upon whose will broke first.

While the fight and the waters swirled around PB Fires, a mile to the north Kilo’s 3rd Platoon was gingerly reconnoitering the terrain. The British had warned that the shrub growth on both sides of Route 611 was littered with mines. All day the platoon had exchanged shots with enemy skirmishers hidden in the cornfields and irrigation ditches. The technical term is “skulking”—shoot, slip along a ditch to another corn patch, wait half an hour, take a random shot, and scoot away. This was the American Indian way of war in skirmishes against the settlers in the eighteenth century.

At the end of a frustrating day, 3rd Platoon had briefly glimpsed only two men with AKs.

The platoon moved into an abandoned compound for the night
and Lt. Cameron West, the platoon commander, called the men together. A strapping outdoorsman who grew up on a cattle ranch in Georgia, he pushed his Marines hard. But on long marches when some straggled, he joked rather than yelled at them. West’s love of the land and outgoing manner had earned him the nickname “Big Country”.

“We lost two Marines near Fires today,” he said. “IEDs are everywhere. Be damn careful. Watch out for each other. Third Platoon is out here by itself.”

A rifle platoon of forty-four men, 3rd Platoon was augmented by two machine gun crews, two mortar crews, a forward observer, and a few snipers. The total number was fifty.

Third Platoon was not a cross section of American society. Back in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, the draft guaranteed that a platoon resembled the face of America, diverse in backgrounds, tastes, and ambitions. In contrast, today’s military is self-selected, educated, and middle-class. Three out of four American youths cannot qualify mentally or physically for today’s military. Nevertheless, the Marine Corps has a one-year waiting list.

The young men in 3rd Platoon were smarter, wealthier, fitter, and more committed than the average American. Most had joined the Marine Corps because of its tough, disciplined standards, and believed the Corps had changed them. They were well trained, but not to the degree of career professionals like the SEALs or Army Special Forces. Most planned to serve for four years and return to civilian life. Only four believed they would learn a trade in the Marine Corps.

Everyone in the platoon had graduated from high school. Seventy-five percent came from a two-parent family, a strong indicator of emotional stability. The average age was twenty-one, and one in three was married, with at least one child. Most considered their tastes in music and movies to be the same as that of their civilian friends. They thought their civilian counterparts were softer than they, but most
said that made no difference. Sixty-five percent “believe in God, his rules and heaven,” while only a few believed God was a myth. Eight out of ten were more caring or appreciative of life due to combat, while only one in ten thought combat had made him harder.

Overall, 3rd Platoon was made up of well-adjusted, self-confident, middle-class young men who liked each other and had confidence in their leader, Big Country.

Day 3. 18,000 Steps

On the morning of October 15, 3rd Platoon resumed scouting for safe paths by the trial-and-error tactic. They walked along, and if no one was blown up, that trail was safe, at least until dark. The Marines had night-vision devices, but they couldn’t shoot someone for being out at night. The sun was scorching, and many farmers tended their corn and poppy after dark—or dug in IEDs.

Second Squad was at point, led by Sgt. Alex Deykeroff, twenty-three, who had two previous combat tours in Iraq. He had joined 3/5 to experience the fight in Afghanistan. Sergeant Dy read a book a week and was a walking encyclopedia of Marine history. He had enjoyed the battalion’s six-month work-up. The command didn’t have screamers at the top and he had free rein to shape the dozen Marines in 2d Squad.

The instructors back in California had trained the battalion based on lessons from Iraq, where patrols used vehicles and IEDs were buried in trash piles next to hard-paved roads. But no one in 3rd Platoon ever patrolled in a vehicle. Marines walked off to the sides of dirt paths, encased among thousands of corn stalks. Herds of sheep and cows, tended by barefoot boys with long sticks, grazed in the few open fields. Thick undergrowth and rows of tall trees lined the irrigation ditches and canals.

The day before, Sergeant Dy had heard the firing when Abbate was engaged near Fires. Dy had climbed onto a roof and watched groups of what he assumed were unarmed farmers scurrying around. Later, he watched the helicopters roar by with dead Marines on board. There were no garbage pits out in the fields. Where were the IEDs hidden?

Slowly, slowly, 2d Squad moved in single file, only a few hundred meters off Route 611. They were walking on an embankment next to a waist-deep canal when LCpl. Tim Wagner, nineteen, saw the edge of a board sticking out of the dirt. Wagner, from Nebraska farm country, needed no prompting. He raised a clenched fist and froze. A few feet away, another Marine stopped, took a careful look around, and pointed at a mound of freshly turned earth. They both backed away.

Sergeant Dy called back to Big Country, about sixty yards behind them.

“We got IEDs up here.”

Lieutenant West was already on super-alert. A farmer had just signaled from his field, shaking his head in a warning not to go farther.

“Don’t advance,” West said.

Big Country then did what he was expected to do, and why the loss rate among Marine second lieutenants is so staggering: he walked up to the front. Platoon sergeants often complain about their young officers being headstrong, but no sergeant wants a leader who holds back. Big Country walked the few meters toward Dy, staying in a swept lane marked by squirts of shaving cream.

He moved carefully around LCpl. Aaron Lantznester, twenty-one, from Ohio. Lantz had bright blue eyes that looked so innocent that the squad called him Bambi. He had found boot camp to be too easy, but later, in infantry training, had paid close attention during the Combat Life Savers course, learning how to treat sucking chest
wounds and massive hemorrhages. The instructors shouted at the recruits when they were least expecting it—during a ten-mile march, or in a classroom, or in the squad bay.

“Jones, lie down! You’ve lost your leg! The rest of you—save him!”

Lantz was carrying eight tourniquets.

As West walked by, he gave Lantz a friendly tap on the helmet.

“Get an engineer up here,” West said.

LCpl. James Boelk, on his first combat patrol as the radio operator, was a few meters behind, scrambling to catch up to his lieutenant. The largest man in the platoon, his squad nicknamed him “Baloo,” after the gentle bear in
The Jungle Book
. Less than a foot away from where a dozen other Marines had walked, Boelk slipped on the bank. An explosion hurled his body into the canal, killing him instantly.

West felt a truck hit him. The force threw him thirty feet backward. He landed with his back against a tree, his leg lying next to him.

The shock wave drove Lantznester’s face into the dirt. For several seconds, he couldn’t hear or focus his eyes. When his vision cleared, he crawled to West, ripped off his shredded armor, and cinched two tourniquets around the gushing stump.

“Tell everyone not to move,” West said. “We gotta …”

West tried to raise his right hand, but it too had been mangled. His face was twisted at an odd angle, a chunk of shrapnel jutting from his left eye.

“You’re okay, sir,” Lantz said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

West felt no pain, only frustration.

“Shut the fuck up, Lantz. Nothing’s okay.”

The blast had scythed down the command group. Burning metal had smashed into LCpl. Zach White’s face, breaking his jaw. Other shards snapped the arm of the corpsman, HM3 Stephen Librando. Two other Marines were holding their torn faces, while a third lay dazed with a concussion.

With the explosion echoing in their ears, no one could hear. An engineer scraped the ground around the blast area, found another IED within arm’s length of Lantz, and snipped the wires. Lantz continued to look after West.

Sergeant Dy, a few feet away, felt like he had been hurled underwater. Everything looked white and faded out, with pieces of corn and dirt swirling and bobbing. With both radios blown, Dy fired off red signal flares.

Staff Sgt. Matt Cartier, the platoon sergeant, made his way up from the rear, staying inside the gobs of shaving cream. He organized first aid and used his radio to call in the disaster. Back at Inkerman, Gunny Carlisle ran to the nearest vehicle, hopped in, and told the startled driver to get up the road. Within minutes, the armored vehicle had skidded to a stop near the red smoke signal marking the casualties out in the field. Carlisle ran down the path, took one look at West’s pale face, hoisted him over his shoulder, and lumbered back to the MRAP. Sergeant Cartier directed the movement of the other litters, and within half an hour all the casualties had been flown out of Inkerman.

The next day, David Boelk, a retired Air Force master sergeant, was sitting at his desk in Washington, D.C. He read of a massive explosion that had killed and wounded several Marines in Sangin. He thought, “
Wow, my son’s unit, somebody died, that really hits close to home.” His office phone rang a few minutes later; then two somber Marines were at his house.

LCpl. James Boelk, twenty-four, left behind his parents, five sisters, and a brother. Matt Cartier, the platoon sergeant, had a soft spot for Boelk, who immediately did everything he was told, with a loopy grin on his face. He was the sort of Marine every sergeant liked to have in his unit—obedient, eager, and good-natured.

Elsewhere in the battalion, an IED explosion killed Sgt. Ian Tawney, twenty-five, of Oregon. His wife, Ashley, was expecting a baby girl in January. Tawney was the top student in squad leader school and graduated as the class
honor man. 3/5 had lost ten Marines and more than thirty-five wounded. At Camp Bastion, the main coalition base in southern Afghanistan, the Personnel Retrieval and Processing Company prepared each body for transit to the States.

“If it was a Marine [body] coming in,” Sgt. Thor Holm wrote to me, “we assumed he was coming from 3/5. We tried to take care of him for his buddies. We ironed every flag.”

Lieutenant Colonel Morris sent a long email to the families of those serving in the battalion.

“
I have decided,” Morris wrote, “not to announce casualty information via the Battalion’s webpage, because I think it will be less mentally draining on families over time than announcing every casualty we sustain as soon as it happens.”

He had a tough time composing that letter. He knew every family was poring over the daily news bulletins. Names of the fallen, however, were not released until a full day after the next of kin had been notified. Even then, in order not to provide intelligence to the enemy, the location of the incident was not revealed. This meant hundreds of families held their breath for two to three days, not knowing who was ringing the doorbell.

The families stayed constantly in touch. Patty Schumacher, whose son Victor had been killed on the 13th, talked with Mark and Teresa Soto. Mark had been Victor’s high school football coach. Together, the three launched a Facebook page entitled “The Boys of 3/5.” A news story about each fallen Marine in 3/5 appeared on the page.