One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (6 page)

“
At the time,” Morris later told NPR, “I was wondering, what were we doing wrong?”

What shocked 3rd Platoon was that it happened so fast. Ten percent of the unit was gone in one thunderous clap, blood and limbs strewn about. Big Country, their cheerful platoon commander, had left them. One day they were intact, and the next day they were leaderless, with holes blown in their ranks.

“We lost so many so fast,” LCpl. Trevor Halcomb, twenty-two, said. “I wasn’t sure I’d get back to Texas to have a happy, healthy family and a house with a white picket fence.”

Captain Nick Johnson knew 3rd Platoon’s morale had sunk. A student of history, Johnson had devoured Cpl. E. B. Sledge’s harrowing book,
With the Old Breed
. Sledge, who had served in Kilo
Company during World War II, depicted battle as a pitiless monster. The “old breed” of Marines, expecting that many among them would die, bottled up their emotions and fought stoically. Kilo’s radio call sign was Sledgehammer. Knowing 3rd Platoon needed a man like Sledge, Captain Johnson reached for the hardest lieutenant he knew.

Second Lt. Victor Garcia looked like a walking rock. If you saw him with a scowl on his face, you’d cross to the other side of the street. He spoke softly and with excellent diction. At thirty-six, he was the oldest lieutenant in the battalion. His parents had immigrated from Mexico to the Salinas farming community in California, where his father was a mechanic. His older brother had served in the Marines, and his two sisters were computer designers.

In high school, Garcia was a champion heavyweight wrestler with mediocre grades. He had joined the Marines in response to a recruiter’s classic gambit that he couldn’t hack it. He liked being a grunt, and did three combat tours in Iraq, progressing from squad leader to platoon sergeant to company gunny. Officers, though, gave the orders, and he wanted to make his own decisions in battle. Selected to attend college as part of the officers program, he enrolled at San Diego State, where he weekly wore his uniform to class. He found the students to be friendly, if a bit intimidated by a Marine gunny. He graduated in two years with straight As, except for a B in Women’s Studies.

Assigned to Kilo Company, he had hoped to command a platoon. But after five years of deployments, he knew how to control mortars, rockets, artillery, and air. That experience landed him at company headquarters as the Fire Support Officer. Now Johnson needed an experienced leader in the field.

“Pack your gear,” he told Garcia, “and take over 3rd. Keep the platoon here at company until you get your feet wet.”

That was it. No rah-rah speech, no pep talk.

Day 4. 24,000 Steps

Garcia called together 3rd Platoon for the first time. The numbed Marines knew he had served as a platoon sergeant in Ramadi, where IEDs, snipers, and rocket-propelled grenades were daily occurrences.

“We’re going to get those sons of bitches,” he said. “We’ll honor our dead by going out again today and every day.”

Staff Sergeant Cartier took Garcia aside.

“I’m the platoon sergeant, sir,” he said. “Lieutenant West and I trained this platoon together. With him gone, I have to show I’m still here for them. Let me take out this patrol without you.”

Garcia knew that Cartier had torn the ligaments in his right knee and, in order to stay in the field, was avoiding the battalion doctor. “You got it,” Garcia said. “Take it slow.”

“I can’t do it any other way.”

The patrol left the wire, exchanged small arms fire for a few hours, and returned with no casualties. After that first step, Garcia and Cartier agreed to a division of labor. The platoon sergeant set the patrol and guard rotations, supervised camp cleanliness, listened to everyone’s gripes, and took care of problems that shouldn’t reach the lieutenant. Lighthearted where Garcia was saturnine, Cartier fitted into the role of counselor and ombudsman for the troops. Garcia didn’t want to come across as the hardass that he was.

“After taking so many losses,” he said, “the platoon was ignoring the little things. They weren’t blousing their trousers, wearing Marine-issue boots, shaving every morning. They were losing the habit of discipline. So each day, I’d suggest one correction to Matt Cartier, and he’d get the point across to the platoon.”

Garcia understood the Marines, but he wasn’t their buddy. As the new platoon commander, he made no effort to mix in. He let the
squad leaders do their jobs, while Cartier kept his finger on the pulse of the unit.

Garcia’s quiet separateness suggested he had seen this all before. Actually, he had no more understanding of village warfare than did the platoon. The Iraqi city of Ramadi had been the classic urban fight. The concrete streets and sidewalks made it impossible to dig in IEDs; the Marines learned to avoid garbage heaps and abandoned cars. Shots came from the upper windows of apartment buildings, not from distant tree lines. Once the Marines gained control of a city block, concrete barriers were erected at the entrances. There were no open spaces inside a city.

The Green Zone was a leap in time back into the paddies and bush of Vietnam. No hard roads, no cars, no bright lights, no Quick Reaction Force mounted in armored vehicles. In Sangin, the local Taliban—about 200 full-time and twice that number as part-time help—simply had to prevent the Marines from pushing outside the lines established by the British. The hated occupiers—the infidels or jafirs—were too powerful to assault head-on. But as long as they were penned in close to their forts, they were no threat. Sooner or later, they would leave. The infidels had the watches, but the Islamist resistance had the time.

Day 5. 30,000 Steps

Shortly after breakfast, 3rd Platoon heard the distant thumps and rattles of a firefight to their north, up near the Kajacki Dam, guarded by India Battery of the 12th Marine Regiment. LCpl. Francisco Jackson had been killed by an IED and his squad was pinned down, unable to recover his body. After a second Marine was shot, the Taliban closed in to prevent the squad from withdrawing. Back at 3/5’s op center, the air officer, Capt. Matt Pasquali, called for an air attack. Two F-18s
responded by dropping two 500-pound bombs, followed by several gun runs.

Low on fuel, the F-18s had returned to base before Garcia left Fires with the morning patrol.

Third Platoon had not moved 500 meters outside the wire before bumping into a Taliban gang. Both sides were moving parallel along thick rows of eight-foot-tall corn when they heard each other. In the ensuing firefight, thousands of bullets scythed down the cornfield. When the shooting ended, the Marines found two dead Taliban and a dead farmer. Nearby another farmer lay moaning with bullets in his leg. The Marines attached a tourniquet and the wounded man was taken by tractor to the district market.

This pattern of fighting—two enemy fighters dead at a cost of one innocent farmer and another badly wounded, plus repeated bombing runs to the north—deeply disturbed the high command. In fact, no army in history ever fought with more restraint than did the Americans, Danes, Dutch, and British in Afghanistan.
Seven out of ten civilian casualties were caused by the Taliban, who insisted that every Pashtun sacrifice for jihad. President Hamid Karzai never complained about Pashtun Taliban killing fellow Pashtuns. But he railed about every casualty caused by the foreigners.
Karzai had pointed an accusing finger at civilian casualties in Sangin just a few months before 3rd Platoon arrived. The high command was determined to increase restrictions until almost no civilian was killed by coalition fire.

Shortly after taking command in mid-2009, Gen. McChrystal had issued an extraordinarily specific order, called a “Tactical Directive,” all the way down to the platoon and squad level.

“The ground commander,” the Tactical Directive read, “will not
employ indirect weapons against a compound that may be occupied by civilians, unless the commander is in a life-threatening position and cannot withdraw.”

The high command, civilian and military, was preaching a theory of benevolent war. The standing order was to ensure PID, Positive Identification, which meant identifying a clear, hostile target before returning fire. But most firefights were exchanges of burning lead and explosives between two tree lines, or between Taliban inside a compound and a coalition patrol in an open field. In 3rd Platoon’s case, within a day of arriving in Sangin, they had seen their friends blown apart, and they carried the bloodstains of their comrades on their cammies.

Each day, a patrol took fire from somewhere out in the corn and bush. How do you convince them
not to shoot back
? What strategic rationale, what spiritual commandment, what sorcery would convince these young men to reject what their drill instructors had drummed into them
—kill before you are killed
? With the enemy wearing civilian clothes and hiding among compliant villagers in flat fields where bullets traveled far distances, the moral choice confronting the grunt—shoot back or hold your fire?—was never clear-cut.

Third Platoon could not advance a kilometer in any direction without receiving fire from a compound. Since no one can see through walls, civilians may have occupied every compound. The odds were heavily against it, but odds are never perfect. In every battalion operations center, a lawyer monitored all calls for artillery or air support, constantly weighing who might face court-martial or be relieved of command for making a wrong call. General George Marshall, the top commander in World War II, believed two qualities were common to every battlefield victor: energy and optimism. Having to check with lawyers before employing indirect fire hindered both energy and optimism.

One night at a remote outpost, I sat opposite a visiting Marine
brigadier general. I asked him about the Tactical Directive. He looked at the candle flickering between us and said not one word.

The following day, it was more of the same for 3rd Platoon—a running gunfight in sector Q1E for six hours. Nothing much to report in the logbook—a few bursts of AK or PKM fire each hour forcing the Marines to flop down and peer at green corn rows, green tree lines, and green grass fields, all shimmering in sweltering, humid heat. No wisps of dust, no tiny red flickers as bullets left the muzzles, no shouts, and definitely no PID. In a day of desultory sniping under the oppressive sun, four enemy were seen, each for only one or two seconds.

Three IEDs were uncovered and blown up without damage. At least that was a plus.

Garcia was learning the fight by walking the ground. But 3rd Platoon didn’t want to lose two commanders in a row. Throughout the patrol, the Marines called him “Garcia,” not out of disrespect but so that the locals couldn’t single him out. Garcia was having none of it.

“Here’s how it is,” Garcia told the platoon. “We step off together, and come back together. I take my chances equally with you. But I’m not ‘Garcia’ to any of you. You call me Lieutenant regardless of where we are.”

Day 8. 48,000 Steps

Captain Johnson sent the platoon north to work out of Patrol Base Fires. PB Fires was an isolated, disintegrating farmhouse enclosed in barbed wire, located in sector Q1E in the center of the Green Zone. Third Platoon was expected to control the Green Zone from the Helmand River in the west to Kilo Company’s headquarters at Inkerman
in the east. First Platoon would operate from Inkerman, while 2d Platoon eventually moved up to Outpost Transformer, a mile north on 611.

As soon as they arrived, Garcia took most of 3rd Platoon out on a large patrol. Amid the thick corn stalks, the Marines could see only a few feet. So Garcia adjusted by splitting the patrol into two sections. One hacked down fighting positions in the sedge and lay ready to fire whenever the other crossed an open spot. Within two hours, the Taliban had sneaked up behind the large unit and opened fire. In the ensuing melee, the Marines killed two men with AKs and two farmers, and Cpl. Hughie, a sniper, took a bullet in his left arm.

Again the inevitable had happened. Panicked farmers had stood erect and tried to run away, unaware they were caught inside the kill zones of the invisible lines of bullets unleashed by both sides. The only way to avoid enfilade fire is to dig down and never stand up, a technique the farmers didn’t understand. On the platoon’s way back to Fires, survivors came forward to complain bitterly about their dead, their terrorized families, and the damage to their crops. Stay out of the fields, they urged the Marines, use the paths. We must know where you are to avoid this.

Garcia shook his head no. The Marines would not walk where they could be easily seen or tracked. They would not go where they were expected. Instead, they would move through the corn every day. When the shooting erupted, some crops would be destroyed and some workers in the fields might die.

The Marines were extra-careful when they were returning to Fires. A circle of barbed wire enclosed their farmhouse. The Marines varied where they exited the wire, and the Taliban didn’t dare set up fixed positions to surround the fort. The platoon mortar teams would gleefully destroy such occupied positions.

Out in the Green Zone, every patrol was eventually seen. The farmers told the spotters, or dickers, who carried the Icom handheld
radios sold in Pakistan for thirty U.S. dollars. The patrols zigzagged unpredictably, but at the end of the day they all returned to base dripping sweat and exhausted. The Taliban learned to lurk near Fires in order to shoot at the backs of the Marines as they trudged across the open space in front of the barbed wire. Sometimes the sniping was so good that the final few Marines had to crawl back inside the wire. No one was hit during the first week, but the reverse siege was unnerving.