One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (9 page)

From the start, Esquibel made it clear to 1st Squad:
he decided how they ran their patrols. He sought no friendships. He viewed his mission as bringing his men home. If that meant hurt feelings or resentments over his cautious exactitude, so be it. After each patrol, he hand-printed in the platoon log a succinct summary, naming those who performed well and those who bitched or hesitated.

“The Taliban were learning too fast,” Esquibel said. “At first, they fired from in close in the cornfields. But we were too good at trading lead. Once they stayed 300 meters away on the other side of a tree line, it was a lot harder to kill them.”

The tactics of 1st Squad were typical of the platoon. Cpl. Darin Hess, the engineer, went first, sweeping with the Vallon. Despite being hit three times by IEDs, he found the will to go back out, moving at the ideal cautious pace Esquibel wanted. Behind him usually came LCpl. Juan Palma, aggressive and sure of himself. The battalion had almost left him behind in the States, due to his “too cool for school” attitude and intolerance of regulations. Esquibel, though, liked Palma’s cockiness.

“On one patrol,” Esquibel said, “I caught him stomping on the ground to show Hess that it was safe to move on. I told Palma, ‘Man, you’re the eyes of the squad. You get yourself blown up and we’re all screwed.’ ”

Esquibel was third in line, followed by a SAW gunner, ready to suppress any tree line with 800 rounds in a minute. Next came a sniper, and then the other Marines. Each patrol had two riflemen with 203s, stubby tubes that lobbed 40mm grenade shells in arcs out to 300 meters. Farther back in the file a Marine carried a second Vallon. Half the squad would move forward or flank the enemy, while the other half provided
covering fire.

“Lieutenant Garcia tells me what he wants,” Esquibel told me, “and I get it done my way.”

Sgt. Alex Deykeroff had transferred to 3/5 because he wanted to fight in Afghanistan and arrived in Sangin expecting to see bare, open country. On large-scale maps, the blue line representing the Helmand River and the tiny slice of green called Sangin were dwarfed by gobs of bare brown desert on either side. Sergeant Dy had pulled three combat tours in the desert of western Iraq near Syria, where centuries of wind had scoured away the sand, leaving thousands of kilometers of hard-packed earth. Burying IEDs in the desert was backbreaking and fruitless work. The Marines, in armored vehicles, drove wherever they pleased across the desert. The odds of a vehicle driving over the exact spot of an IED were one in a thousand.

But Sangin’s Green Zone, with its expansive, soggy fields of tall corn and low visibility, meant close-in fighting. To Dy, that was fine. He and Sergeant Thoman, the leader of 3rd Squad, weren’t concerned about crossfires. While watching YouTube together back in California, they’d laughed when Bill O’Reilly had lost his temper and yelled to his camera crew, “We’ll do it live! Fuck it!” Now they enjoyed harassing each other before a patrol by yelling the same thing: “Do it live!”

The squad leaders knew how to adapt in firefights, but the IEDs rattled them both. The day after Abbate’s fight, Dy saw four members of his 2d Squad blown up along with Lieutenant West. Farther back in the column with 3rd Squad, Sergeant Thoman helped to carry out the casualties. Neither wanted to lose anyone else to an IED, but they seemed to be everywhere, on every canal bank, at every break in a tree line, at the edge of every field. Dy and Thoman talked it over and agreed not to push their men. They would stall for time until they could figure out the IED threat.

“We weren’t shutting down,” Thoman said. “But we had slowed the pace to get a grasp on the enemy tactics.”

When Garcia gave 2d Squad a sector to check out, Dy marked its edge on his map, moved forward until his GPS touched that line, spread out his men, and watched for movement in the far fields. Technically, he was accomplishing the mission.

Shortly after Dominguez was blown up, Dy’s squad was approaching an abandoned compound when a boy ran up, warning that an IED was buried up ahead. Then he ran off, leaving a rattled Dy to decide whether the boy was telling the truth, or wanted the squad to use an alternate route that was mined. Garcia, who was accompanying the patrol, said nothing.

“Every squad leader,” Garcia said, “had to find his own comfort level. The worst thing I could do was pressure someone into a hasty mistake.”

That night, he took Dy aside.

“He said my squad had been hit the most,” Dy said. “But we all had to run the same risks every day, no matter who had been hit the hardest. I got the message. He never said a word in front of anyone else.”

Garcia’s fix was simple. Before a patrol, he picked out a compound numbered on the map and told Dy to report back what he found inside the compound. When no IED was triggered on patrol after patrol, Dy and 2d Squad would start to feel surer of themselves.

“Deykeroff was best with the people,” Garcia said. “He loved to talk, easygoing, smiling. Sometimes a kid would even lead his squad across a few fields.”

Pushing north one day, 2d Squad reached the edge of the large open area called the Golf Course. Nearby, three men were digging an irrigation ditch. One of the diggers started waving his shovel back and forth, and within a minute several AKs and a PKM opened fire from the opposite side of the field. The Marines shot the digger. A battlefield was not a court of law.

Dy radioed in the shot before returning. When Garcia plotted the
position, he saw that Deykeroff was 500 meters beyond his assigned compound. Confidence regained.

After two tours in Iraq, Sgt. Clint Thoman, the 3rd Squad leader, had ample combat experience. Initially, Thoman would lead his 3rd Squad deeper into the sector than Deykeroff, but if the Taliban shot at them, he pulled back rather than risk striking an IED by pushing forward. It was obvious to Garcia that Thoman too was constantly remembering Dominguez, and was loath to put his point element at risk again.

Thoman noticed that the platoon commander didn’t say much when he accompanied 3rd Squad. But he knew Garcia was evaluating him. One day when Garcia was back at Fires, a call for mortar support came in from Thoman.

“What do you have?” Garcia radioed.

“Taking fire from our north,” Thoman said. “Two to four shooters.”

Garcia expected Thoman to break contact and pull back to base.

“Roger. Are you disengaging?”

“Negative. I’m pushing forward.”

Thoman told one four-man fire team to flank the enemy from the east. When a larger Taliban gang turned toward them, the team pulled back. This wasn’t unusual. Contrary to public image, Marines do have some common sense. The sniper with the fire team was LCpl. Willie Deel, twenty, from Kansas. His wife was waiting back in California. Willie had this vision: they would have a good life in California, and one day when he was old, his children would ask what he did in the war and he would say, “We made a difference.”

Willie Deel’s difference was his shooting skill. As the fire team pulled back, he settled in his bipod, peered through the scope, and shot the lead Taliban in the chest. The others fell back to an adjoining
tree line, and the two sides exchanged fire for an hour without another casualty.

Thoman kept sliding 3rd Squad forward inside the concealment of the trees, looking for a chance to trap the enemy. The Taliban were yelling back and forth to each other, trying to figure out where the Marines were. When they sent children out from a compound to look, Thoman told his men not to fire or move. By the time the children went back inside, the Taliban had pulled out.

Thoman called back to Garcia at Fire.

“Sledgehammer 6, this is 2. No joy. The fuckers have disappeared. We have one Taliban body.”

“I knew then,” Garcia said, “that Thoman had broken through his fear of the IEDs.”

Thoman appreciated Garcia’s style.

“I talked with the lieutenant before each patrol,” Thoman said. “He explained what he wanted done, but didn’t tell me how to do it. I didn’t second-guess myself when he came out with me. I was in charge.”

While 3rd Platoon now had three solid squad leaders—Esquibel, Deykeroff, and Thoman—supported by two accurate 60mm mortar crews, they had taken so many casualties that the patrols went undermanned. Garcia didn’t have sufficient grunts, until the snipers volunteered.

Sgt. Matt Abbate commanded two sniper sections, totaling ten men. The snipers brought more skills than expert shooting. Before a sniper received the symbolic HOG (Hunter of Gunmen) bullet, he had to prove he could plan and carry out a mission from start to finish—select the routes, choose the gear, arrange the comms, evaluate enemy countermoves, accomplish the kill, and return safely. Each sniper was expected to have the decision-making skills of a squad leader.

Before arriving in Sangin, the snipers had been wary of joining Kilo Company, after some troops had grumbled about “Boot Camp Kilo.” Of the four services, the Marine Corps teetered the closest to that thin line separating discipline from rote harassment. Some Marine units were too rigid. In mature commando units like the SEAL and Special Forces teams, officers and enlisted were on a first-name basis. In the Marines, a corporal was called “Corporal.”

Gunny Sergeant Carlisle was a terror in training. You did it his way, or you did it again and again until it was done his way. The skipper, Capt. Nick Johnson, believed in traditions. He wanted things done “the Old Breed way,” meaning sweat, grunge, and order. But once Kilo arrived in Sangin, the company was all about fighting. “Old Breed” meant everyone was expected to be a fighter, and even Gunny Carlisle, senior as he was, went on patrols. It was all about the job.

The snipers were supposed to stay at Inkerman. But every patrol from Fires was making contact, so in early November Abbate brought his snipers over to 3rd Platoon to work for a few days. Once there, they never left. The action was too constant. Technically, they were “in support,” meaning they reported back to battalion, not to Garcia. Practically, they fitted right in, having their own fire pit and caves, attending the daily briefs, and pitching in where needed.

According to doctrine, sniper teams weren’t supposed to integrate into regular grunt patrols as though they were additional riflemen. That would take away their special skills. Third Platoon and Abbate, though, were flexible. Together they learned that leaving snipers behind in hide sites rarely worked. Every tiller in the field—woman, child, or man—was potentially a spotter. Most times, snipers in a hide site never saw a man with a weapon.

The patrols were a different story. Two or three snipers accompanied each squad patrol. The snipers practiced close-in snap shooting as well as long-distance accuracy. Where the average grunt may have
300 hours rifle practice, a sniper had 3,000 hours. After first shooting at a patrol, the Taliban liked to dog the flanks for a second shot. The snipers, with the call sign Banshee, waited for that moment. When a man with an AK broke cover and ran twenty yards across an open field to stay abreast of the patrol, that six-second run became a trip to eternity. About every other day, a sniper killed a Taliban fighter.

The Taliban hung in there, trying to even the score. Abbate and Cpl. Jordan Laird, twenty-four, from Idaho were standing beside a tree when a bullet zipped between their two heads, struck the wood, and sprayed splinters into Laird’s face. Both burst out laughing at what Laird called “the surreal feeling of being alive when you should be dead.”

The next day, Laird was acting as the cover man for a patrol crossing a large open field. Through his telescope, he saw a man in the far tree line talking on an Icom. After watching the patrol, the man scurried through the shrubbery, opened a sack, and began to hastily dig a hole. Laird dialed in the range of 285 meters and shot him in the chest.

A few days later, an enemy machine gunner caught the snipers climbing out of their hide in a ditch 500 meters north of Fires. A three-round burst of PKM fire sent a round through Abbate’s trousers, knocked the flash suppressor off another Marine’s rifle, and left a red crease along the leg of a third. With a slight adjustment, the machine gunner would have hit all three. Instead, the snipers returned fire and killed two Taliban. Searching the bodies, the snipers found a wad of Pakistani money, a high-frequency Chinese radio, and a bag of white powder that they poured into the dirt.

Nothing is worse for morale than losing lives and limbs to mines and never engaging an elusive enemy. The snipers provided 3rd Platoon with the satisfaction of payback.