One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (7 page)

Day 9. 54,000 Steps

Cpl. Jeff Sibley, a twenty-three-year-old sniper from California, was strapping on his kit for a patrol when a shot rang out.
The sentry in a nearby guard tower stumbled down, a bullet had smashed his left forearm, with a piece of white bone sticking through. Abbate grabbed Sibley and three other snipers and left the fort, pursuing the sound of the shot northwest.

Sibley, carrying a 7.62mm semiautomatic sniper rifle, was thoroughly trained. He had been drilled in keeping a daily shooting log, sketching a diagram of the terrain, recording the trajectory of bullet drop and drift over varying ranges. He could call shots by watching the bullet’s vapor trail, calculating milliradians to compensate for the pull of gravity, estimating windage and mirage, glassing systematically, employing a noise suppressor, giving clear directions to orient on a target, and practicing rapid fire at multiple targets. Over the past week, he had killed two Taliban.

He wasn’t worried about this sudden mission. He was on his second combat tour, and was convinced that five snipers could decimate any Taliban gang. Once he had walked a few hundred meters into the cornfields, Sibley called in mortars to their front. He assumed whoever had shot the sentry was pulling back. Maybe a mortar shell would get lucky. It was a “danger close” mission, meaning the shells would land within a hundred meters of the patrol. To adjust the
rounds, Sibley walked to the edge of a corn row and was looking out when he felt a hard punch under his left armpit.

“Fuck,” he yelled, “I think I’ve been shot.”

He stumbled back a few feet and sat down heavily. Abbate pulled off Sibley’s armor and peered at the bullet hole.

“Holy shit,” Abbate said, “this looks fucked up.”

The other snipers peered at the entry wound in Sibley’s side and nodded. Abbate reconsidered his words.

“Nah, you’re fine,” Abbate said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Sibley laughed, the pain doubling him over.

“Could be a sucking chest wound,” Cpl. Jacob Ruiz offered helpfully.

None of them had any idea whether that was true, but it sounded serious.

“Can you breathe?” Abbate asked.

“What do you think I’m doing?” Sibley said.

“Then you’re okay,” Abbate said. “We’ll push ahead. You go back.”

Supported by Ruiz, Sibley hobbled back. At one point, harassing fire forced them into a ditch. From Fires, Sibley was flown to Camp Leatherneck, where a surgeon removed a small caliber bullet that had caused no major damage. When Sibley woke up in the hospital, he saw Lance Corporal Kane, the sentry who’d been shot in the forearm, lying in the next bed.

“How’d it go out there?” Kane asked.

“Not too fucking good, man,” Sibley said, “or I wouldn’t be lying next to you.”

Day 11. 66,000 Steps

Sgt. Clint Thoman, thirty-four, from Colorado, led the 3rd Squad. He was on his third combat tour, having served both in the elite Fleet
Anti-Terrorism Security Team and in the 2004 bloody assault against the city of Fallujah. His street-fighting experience didn’t help in Sangin. He judged the mood inside his squad and inside the platoon as nervous and fatalistic.

“The platoon felt everyone would be blown up eventually,” he said. “Made no difference if you were a boot on your first tour or an experienced NCO. You’d walk and walk until an IED got you. It was a matter of time. Not if, but when. That didn’t stop us from patrolling, but everyone thought about it. You were going to get blown up.”

That was the worst feeling a small unit can have—the foreboding of death, imminent and impersonal, overwhelming anything you do to protect yourself. That conviction leads to a dread of patrolling. What follows is the construction of forts and colored dots on a map designating the “Forward Line of Troops.” Everything beyond the FLOT is conceded to the Taliban. When that happens, the enemy has won: game, set, match.

Knowing that attack helicopters and Predator drones lurked overhead, the Taliban avoided massing in large numbers; they preferred to maneuver in groups of three or six. Lacking the marksmanship of the Marines, they had to shoot hastily and run quickly to another position, or fired from so far back that the trees spoiled their aim. In any fight decided by bullets rather than IEDs, they became the hunted rather than the hunters, provided the Marines had the confidence to advance across the IED-laced fields.

On October 23, Garcia was accompanying Thoman and his squad on a patrol northwest of Fires. On his photomap, each thousand-meter square was outlined in yellow and marked alphanumerically, such as P8Q or Q1D. Inside each square, every compound was numbered. That way, a pilot or mortar crew could be quickly told the location of a target.

Normally, about 8,000 people lived in the 500-odd compounds in
3rd Platoon’s area. But since the shooting that erupted following the arrival of the Marines, most compounds to the north of Fires were abandoned. Walking in the middle of the patrol, Garcia noticed that the point element was veering toward empty Compound 17 in sector Q1E. Everyone in the patrol had listened to the same brief. Months earlier, a friendly squad had used #17 as a lookout post. Be careful; it could be mined.

Garcia felt uneasy, but what was he to do? He was new to the platoon, and every grunt has occasional feelings of impending doom. The point element was following a trail of beaten-down grass around the compound wall. Garcia thought they were edging too close, but he didn’t butt in. Sgt. Clint Thoman felt the same way, keeping steady, not showing any nervousness.

Both leaders had combat experience, but didn’t know this territory, or how the enemy acted. They did know that taking counsel of your fears was the surest way to spread doubt and hesitation. If the men at point believed their leaders had lost faith in them, that word would spread and this was only their eleventh day.

The sudden shock wave rippled past Garcia, followed by a high-screeching echo in the ears, stinging in the eyes, and a sucking for breath that left an acrid taste. Oh shit, not again. Three Marines were staggering around, groggy from concussions. Lying near them was LCpl. Juan Dominguez, who always had a quip and never hesitated to walk at point. The IED had ripped him apart, severing a leg, an arm, and mangling his other leg beyond repair. In an instant, a triple amputee.

After the evacuations, Sergeant Thoman took aside his 3rd Squad back at Fires to reassure them as best he could. It was tough. Third Squad had seen Lieutenant West and Corporal Boelk go down, and now it was Dominguez.

Garcia was shaken. Here he was, the new platoon commander, and he had done nothing. Could he have prevented it by yelling out
from a hundred yards in the rear? How would the squad leaders react in the future, if he interfered whenever he felt something was going wrong?

In Vietnam in
the summer of 1966, I was on patrol in a bad area called Hill 55. For hours we had been on the move in scorching heat, harassed by snipers. Warned about mines, we walked in the tracks of an amphibious vehicle that chugged along at point, its tense crew sitting on sandbags.

As we crossed a dry paddy,
Wham!
, a pressure wave buffeted me from behind. I turned around and saw three Marines down in the dust. Exhausted from the heat, they had wandered out of the tracks and been blown off their feet by the mine. Two lay dazed, with nonlife-threatening lacerations. The third was screaming, with red-hot shrapnel seared deep into his thighs and blood spurting out. A double amputee.

Our corpsman, Doc Robert Perkins, swiftly wrapped elastic cords around both stumps and injected morphine. Platoon Sgt. William Cunningham, anguish and frustration in his eyes, called for a helo.

“Stay in the tracks,” he screamed at the wounded, pointing down at the tread marks. “I told you. The goddamn tracks! I told you!”

He was angrier at himself than at his men. A commander can’t protect everyone or prevent everything, but that’s not how he feels when things go wrong. What if he had done something differently?

Garcia felt the same way.

“Dominguez was my low point,” Garcia said. “I felt like crap. I went back to Inkerman and emailed a commander I had served with in Iraq. He wrote back that if I hadn’t been there, it still would have happened. His tough-love message was to suck it up and get back in the fight.”

The enemy had won the first round. On October 13, an IED had taken the lives of four Marines. On the 14th, three more died, with far worse disaster prevented only by Abbate. On the 15th, Boelk was blown up and Big Country West lost his leg. On the 21st, Kane and Sibley were shot. On the 23rd, Dominguez was cut down.

The nights were hardest for 3rd Platoon. As they dropped off to sleep, it seemed mines lurked everywhere, waiting to rip the life or the legs from one Marine after another, until no one was left.

Day 16. 96,000 Steps

The Taliban plan was battle-tested. They had kept the British hemmed in by IED belts that sealed off the Green Zone and allowed the Taliban to travel freely on back roads and rest securely in compounds until they chose the next fight. There was no way they were allowing 3rd Platoon to stay at Fires, right in the middle of the Green Zone.

“In Iraq, the danger was the RPG,” Garcia said. “In Sangin, it was the IED. The British had this mind-set about establishing a forward line of troops. So the Taliban buried mines outside the British line. I had to show my platoon that once we broke through the mine belts, we’d fight them on our terms. We had to get in their rear to dislodge them.”

So on the morning of October 28, Garcia packed up the entire platoon and headed southwest into sector Q1A on a three-day operation. At point, two engineers swept their Vallons back and forth, stopping to prod the dirt with their knives. The Marines walked carefully in a long single file, covering less than a hundred meters in the first hour. Garcia didn’t care how long they took.

The white flags of the Taliban flew above the walls of abandoned
compounds, taunting the Marines, daring them to approach. Dickers on motorbikes puttered along on the flanks, tracking the platoon’s movement. There was not a thing the Marines could do about them.

Avoiding the obvious trails and crossings at the canals and irrigation ditches, the patrol plunged through acre after acre of sweltering corn. Occasionally from an adjoining field a few hundred meters away, someone would randomly shoot off a few rounds, hoping to attract return fire that would give away the platoon’s position.

When the Marines entered a field, the Taliban scooted out the other end. Skirmishers instinctively hate being trapped. In the Vietnam battle for Hue City in 1968, the North Vietnamese would run out the rear of the houses when the Marines approached from the front. It was the same in the Sangin cornfields.

Around noon, the platoon crossed an untilled field. LCpl. Tim Wagner, nineteen, was again at point. He had performed well when Lieutenant West was hit, and Sergeant Thoman, his squad leader, had confidence in him. Wagner planned to go to college back in the Midwest and live there for the rest of his life. Tall, skinny, and smart, he knew when things were off-kilter out in the fields. Once the platoon stepped into the open, he took note of several trees, about fifty meters apart, with the lower branches hacked off.

“Aiming stakes,” he shouted, meaning the trees were markers for weapons fired from a distance.

Sure enough, a burst of PKM bullets zipped past. One bullet knocked the night-vision goggles off Wagner’s helmet. Farther back in the file, LCpl. Brandon Weese took a round through his right hand. It took an hour to drive off the Taliban. By that time, a dozen sheep had been slaughtered in the crossfire, marking the landing zone for the medevac helicopter.

After that, the pace of the platoon slowed to a crawl. The engineers with their Vallons were tired and felt they had done more than their share. Not one IED had been found, confirming Garcia’s suspicion
that the enemy didn’t mine their own territory. As clouds and fog moved in at twilight, the platoon set up defenses inside an abandoned compound. Two donkeys were foraging in the courtyard with all their legs still attached, a sure indication that IEDs did not lay in wait.

But soon, small enemy groups were shooting from behind the outer walls of neighboring compounds. Two motorcycles drove rapidly up to a nearby compound. Three men ran inside, and minutes later a few RPG rockets arced toward the Marine position and exploded short of the target. Garcia felt a twinge of doubt. He had brought his platoon two miles inside enemy territory. If he took a casualty, evacuation after dark was doubtful. He needed help, something to shake up the Taliban before they gathered enough force for a night attack.

“Driftwood, this is Sledgehammer 3,” he radioed to Kilo’s ops center. “I’m in compound 13 in Quebec One Alpha. Under fire from Compound 12 due west. Got anything on station?”

Driftwood was the call sign for Capt. Chuck “Spokes” Beardsley, whose lifetime dream had been to be a pilot. Motivated by 9/11, he had joined the Marines and for three years flew the KC-130 transportation workhorse. Then he volunteered to serve as an air controller with the grunts and was assigned to Kilo Company.