One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (8 page)

Spokes told Garcia that two F-18s were on call. Marine squadron VMFA-232, “Red Devils,” was stationed at Kandahar air base, a hundred miles to the east. Whenever Red Devils were airborne, Kilo and the other companies were alerted via a digital chat room.

Garcia turned the air mission over to Staff Sgt. Nick Tock, a forward observer. Tock radioed to Beardlsey the standard 9-line brief, describing the target location, nearest friendly troops, direction for the bomb run, and other vital information.

Spokes passed the data to the pilots and to the battalion senior air officer, who consulted with the battalion lawyer. Both authorized a
strike and notified the pilots that rules 421 to 424, set down by General McChrystal, had been satisfied. This meant that Garcia could not retreat safely, that no civilians were observed, and that hostile fire was coming from the target compound. Gen. David Petraeus had taken over from McChrystal in July. He had left the rules in effect, but also let the Marines employ Marine air without interfering.

Although a videotape of every bomb run was later reviewed by a lawyer, the pilots dropped bombs based on faith in what the grunt on the ground reported. During their six-month deployment, the twelve F-18s in VMFA Squadron 232 dropped 80,000 pounds of high explosives. Across Afghanistan, nine out of ten strike aircraft returned to base with their full load of ordnance. For the Red Devils squadron down in Helmand, nine of ten aircraft expended their ordnance supporting the ground patrols.

Hovering 10,000 feet above 3rd Platoon were Capts. Jimmy “Postal” Knipe and Taj “Cabbie” Sareen. Cabbie rolled in first.

“Sledgehammer, this is Stoic 74,” Sareen radioed. “Off safe. One away. Lasing.”

Lasing meant that the bomb was following a laser beam from the aircraft to the compound.

Third Platoon kept their heads down. They were inside the “danger close” radius of shrapnel from the GBU-12 500-pound bomb. The compound shuddered under the explosion, but did not collapse.

“That’s a shack,” Tock radioed, meaning a direct hit.

The two F-18s circled, waiting. Both were equipped with day and night cameras that could distinguish between a man and a woman from 10,000 feet. Watching the video feeds at 3/5’s ops center, the air officer, Capt. Matt “Squeeze” Pasquali, had often seen men running from the rubble. The lead F-18 bombed the compound, while the second F-18 trailed behind and twenty seconds later delivered another 500-pounder that burst in the air to scythe down any squirters. This was called “shake and bake.”

Knipe, trailing in Stoic 73, was poised to roll in when a secondary explosion rocked the compound, probably RPG rockets cooking off. No squirters emerged. The aircraft loitered hawklike above 3rd Platoon for the next fifteen minutes. No enemy fired at the 3rd Platoon. The F-18s returned to base.

After it was dark, Garcia occasionally called for illumination rounds above the platoon’s compound, demonstrating that the 60mm mortar crew back at Fires would respond quickly. The next day, no enemy fire was received, while several farmers came forward, curious about the strangers. No British or American soldiers had been in the area before. The farmers seemed tolerant but wary. Would the foreigners be staying long?

When the platoon went back to Fires two days later, they took back with them a white Taliban flag they had ripped from a tree. It wasn’t much, but it gave Staff Sgt. Matt Cartier, the platoon sergeant, something to build on.

“I told them,” he said, “we’d gone into Taliban territory and they couldn’t protect their own flag.”

Garcia had no intention of lugging the entire platoon around the battlefield. He had eight sectors to cover, 500 compounds to search, and a thousand irrigation ditches to cross. If the platoon stayed together, it could never dislodge the Taliban. He had to send out two to three squad patrols a day, often going in different directions.

“The Taliban will swarm a squad,” he said, “unless they fear indirect fire. My squad leaders had to believe they could call in fire anytime they wanted. The whole platoon had seen the air support Spokes Beardsley delivered. That made a difference.”

While 3rd Platoon was out on their operation, Lieutenant Colonel Morris emailed back to the families, “
Despite taking tough losses in the first days in their area of operations, the Battalion has dusted itself
off and continued to move forward.… I just conducted a memorial service for LCpls Catherwood, Boelk and Lopez from Kilo Company … will send you another update. In the meantime, we’ll be ‘getting some’!”

“Get some” means kill the enemy, and it was 3/5’s motto.

Sometimes IEDs struck unwary children in the fields, although for the most part the farmers knew which areas to avoid. The villagers allowed the Taliban to use children as shields. Out of fear and/or tribal loyalty, they kept quiet about the locations of the IEDs and the Taliban gangs. The tribes accepted callousness from the Taliban.

American firepower, on the other hand, angered and distressed the people. The image of Americans rolling about in large armored convoys or swooping in to burn an enemy village was a caricature. The people weren’t forcibly moved, as happened in Vietnam. Nor were there free fire zones or indiscriminate bombing.

The reality was more complicated. The Marine approach was to spread out a battalion across a district, clear it, and then turn it over to Afghan forces to hold. In Sangin, the tribes were firmly controlled by, and contributed to, the Taliban. And so the clearing operation became a brutal fight between the Marines and the insurgents. Usually, the Marines didn’t see the Taliban, and shot back after they were fired at. They struck the compounds, tree lines, and fields from which they received fire. Naturally, the farmers fled in fear and resentment.

This wasn’t happening just in 3rd Platoon’s area. A dozen platoon commanders in 3/5 were reacting like Garcia. A Marine spokesman claimed, “
There is nothing out of the norm in terms of operations in Sangin.” But it wasn’t true. October marked the highest number of air strikes in two years, led by 3/5 in Sangin. And Kilo called in the most air strikes of any company, led by 3rd Platoon.

Sangin was a war of attrition, not counterinsurgency. Controlling the farmlands was psychological, not physical. Neither the Taliban nor the Marines could be everywhere. Each side has to send out small groups of men willing to fight when they bumped into the other side. Once one side flinched and avoided entering certain areas, the other side had won. When the Taliban could not sustain their losses, they would withdraw. To break the grip of the Taliban, Garcia’s challenge wasn’t so much the enemy; it was convincing his own Marines that they could survive seven months without being blown up.

With the platoon back at Fires, Staff Sgt. Matt Cartier was beginning to feel a bit more upbeat. The fear of the IEDs gave the Taliban a mental edge, but he sensed that the gloom enveloping the platoon had lifted slightly. The operation had proved an elementary point: the enemy could not plant mines everywhere.

Garcia was putting it together. The Iraqi experience had led the Marines astray. In Iraq, a dozen or more civilians lived in a concrete house encased by a stout concrete wall that separated it from the next house. Fifty or sixty houses made up a block, several dozen blocks constituted a neighborhood. The neighborhoods were bounded by broad streets. Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias fought for every inch of turf. As soon as a family on one block was frightened into
fleeing, the other side moved in one of its own families. Both Shiite and Sunni fighters planted IEDs along the roads used by the U.S. military, but not inside recently vacated houses families from their own side would occupy within a day or two.

In Sangin, the Taliban were placing their IEDs inside the courtyards and rooms of abandoned compounds. On their forays over the years, coalition troops occasionally stayed overnight in a few isolated, easily defended compounds, abandoned due to the fighting. After they left, the Taliban set pressure plates in the rooms, walls, courtyards, and adjoining pathways. Unlike in the fields, the Taliban didn’t keep track of where they placed them.

Once a compound was rigged, no locals would go near it. A family lost their home, but the Taliban didn’t care. They set the rules, and everyone was supposed to contribute to the jihad against the infidel foreigners. Abandoning his farm was the least a farmer could contribute. Hundreds of compounds stood empty for months. The Taliban reserved a few for their intermittent use. The others were death traps awaiting a fresh set of foreigners.

In 2010, Sangin wasn’t ready for economic development, local government, or farm granges. It might never be ready. The Taliban were embedded among the people. Some were auxiliaries—young men living at home with AKs hidden nearby. Most were roaming about in gangs of four to six, staying in one abandoned compound for several days before moving to another. Whenever the Marines left the wire, farmers and Taliban alike grabbed their cell phones and Icoms to report their movement.

Sangin was like France in late 1944, a battleground where the civilians hid or ran away while the two armed sides slugged it out. The practical definition of control is the confidence to walk where you please, without being shot at. A dog pisses on trees to mark his territory. Similarly, young insurgents cannot resist taking potshots at government soldiers. The same was true in Vietnam and Iraq. Judging
by the daily sniping at every patrol, the Taliban were firmly in control.

Back at Fires, Garcia called together his three squad leaders. Lieutenant West was immensely popular and his spirit hung over the platoon. Garcia knew he had to tread carefully.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Our routine will be two squad patrols each day, with a third squad as the QRF”—Quick Reaction Force.

Sgt. Dominic Esquibel, thirty-three, led the 1st Squad. Esquibel wore the ugliest black-rimmed glasses known to man, with shatterproof lenses thick enough to stop a bullet. Slight of frame and diffident in demeanor, he would blend in among the geeks manning the Genius Bar at an Apple Store.

On Thanksgiving Day back in 2004, Esquibel’s platoon was completing its twenty-first day of house-to-house fighting in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Suicidal jihadists were hiding amid the city’s 10,000 houses. In three weeks, the Marines had engaged in more firefights inside rooms than the combined total of all police SWAT teams in history.

Esquibel’s platoon was assigned to a sector called Queens, a slum neighborhood of one-story concrete buildings. His job as a scout-sniper was to climb onto a roof and cover the alleys while the squad below him searched room to room. As the squad entered a courtyard, five were struck down by firing from inside the house. Esquibel ran to the lip of the roof and hurled a grenade through a window, killing two insurgents and destroying a machine gun. He then crawled across the roof and threw down a second grenade, killing two more and taking out another machine gun. When a tank moved in and began bashing a hole in the courtyard wall, Esquibel took advantage of the dust and noise to drop off the roof and drag a wounded Marine to safety. He then waited until the tank gun fired and darted
back into the courtyard, dragging out a second Marine. When the tank again fired, he raced inside a third time, beat out the flames on the body of a mortally wounded Marine, and dragged him outside.

Awarded the Navy Cross—second only to the Medal of Honor—Esquibel refused to wear the medal or to discuss his valor. He was so self-effacing that he requested the Marine Corps to delete the medal from the records (which the Marines refused to do). When I mentioned other Marines I knew during the Fallujah battle, he readily reminisced about them. When I asked about his actions, he waved me off.

“I’m not going there, sir,” he said. “This is my last rodeo. I’m getting out once we’re back in the States. It’s not about me. I’m here for my men, and that’s all.”

Esquibel was as old as Garcia. He respected the former gunnery sergeant, but didn’t hold him in awe. Esquibel accepted every patrol order and carried out the mission to the letter—his way. Determined to bring every member of his squad back in one piece, he maneuvered 1st Squad firmly and with great caution. He assumed an IED lurked on every cow path, every opening in a tree line, and every irrigation bank. If it took an hour to move 1st Squad one hundred meters—and it often did—that was fine with him. In fact, he took pride in his deliberate approach.

“I take the most miserable way,” Esquibel said. “We wade across every canal. My nickname is ‘Wet Bridge.’ I go wherever Lieutenant Garcia wants, and I don’t care if it takes me all day. I like open fields. When we take fire, we can outshoot them. Sure, we’re lying in mud, wet and shivering. But that’s better than getting blown up.”

Garcia considered Esquibel as stubborn as a mule and as reliable. He wouldn’t be hurried or badgered into altering his pace. Believing that any straight path led to perdition, Esquibel invariably took a circuitous route. Despite grumblings from his squad, he chose to hack through thickets rather than trust a cow path. No matter how many
footprints showed that farmers routinely crossed over log bridges, 1st Squad sloshed through chest-high muddy water.