One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War

Battalion 3/5 suffered the highest number of casualties in the war in Afghanistan. This is the story of one platoon in that distinguished battalion.

Suppose you’re offered $15,000 to walk two and a half miles each day for six months. In total, you will take one million steps and be well paid for losing a few pounds. Interested?

There are a few provisos. First, you must live in a cave. Second, your exercise consists of walking across minefields. Third, each day men will try to kill you. The odds are 50-50 that you will die or lose a leg before you complete the one million steps. Still interested?

This is the story of fifty men who said yes. Third Platoon fought the hardest sustained battle of the Afghanistan war. When we think of courage, we imagine a man acting bravely in a terrifying situation that lasts for a minute or an hour. These men battled fiercely for 200 days. Because U.S. forces were leaving Afghanistan, they knew their effort was a footprint in the sand. Yet every day they went forth to find and kill the enemy. Half of them didn’t make it intact to the end of their tour.

What kept them going?

When I embedded with 3rd Platoon, I felt at home with them because I’m a Marine infantryman, a grunt. That was how I was raised. After Pearl Harbor, my uncle and his baseball team joined the Marines. In 1942, I was two years old when they came home after seizing the island of Guadalcanal. The team spent their leave hanging out in their clubhouse in our attic. Assuming they were the resident babysitters, my mother placed me in their care.

Thus began my four-year education. After each campaign—Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—the survivors returned to their clubhouse. They gave me a toy rifle and tiny uniform, played endless games, and smuggled me down the back stairs wrapped in a blanket when they went out. No boy ever had more protective or peculiar guardians.

A few months after my college graduation, I said good-bye to my parents and left for law school. Across from the train station, the Marine Corps had a recruiting station. When I returned home a few hours later, my mother simply said, “You joined the Marines, didn’t you?”

Like thousands of my fellow grunts, I wore out several pairs of boots in the jungles of Vietnam. I wrote two books about that war, a manual of small unit tactics and the story of a squad that lived in a Vietnamese village for a year. Forty years later, I went back to war. Between 2003 and 2013, I embedded with dozens of Army and Marine units in repeated trips to Iraq and Afghanistan.

From one war to the next, I joined our grunt platoons and grew close to many who died in battle. In Afghanistan, the realities confronting the platoons mocked the proclamations of our generals. Our officials insisted that our troops act as nation builders, a Sisyphean task that confused both the Afghan tribes and our troops. Our generals promised victory, while insisting that killing the enemy could not win the war. Instead, our grunts were ordered to persuade medieval Islamic tribes to support a mendacious government in Kabul. This strategy was contrary to military and political logic.

We invaded Afghanistan to destroy the Al Qaeda terrorist organization. We stayed to build a nation. This required fighting the Taliban insurgents who were woven into the fabric of the society, while the Afghan government failed to foster a spirit of nationalism. Our grunts departed Afghanistan deeply skeptical of the wisdom of their senior commanders.

This is my sixth and final book about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As I look back, it is clear that America and the West tried to do too much. When Saigon fell in 1975, the secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, assured our soldiers that “your cause was just and noble.” That is equally true of Iraq and Afghanistan. A flawed war policy can coexist with a soldier’s determination to fight for his country.

Afghanistan was America’s longest war, persisting for thirteen years. The fiercest fighting took place in a farming community called Sangin in southern Afghanistan. In response to the Marine offensive in the fall of 2010, the Taliban mounted a stout resistance. Week after week, the casualty toll mounted. Appalled, the secretary of defense offered to pull the Marines back. The Marines refused.

Third Platoon was one of three platoons in Kilo Company; Kilo was one of three rifle companies in 3/5—the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment. When I arrived in January of 2011, 3rd Platoon was locked in mortal combat. Their lieutenant was in a hospital with an amputated leg. Their inspirational sergeant, who led in every fight, was dead. One of their squad leaders was gone, and his replacement was limping around with a bullet wound, fearing he would be sent to the rear if he sought treatment.

They lived in caves outside friendly lines, without computer connections. Twice a month, they called home to lie about how safe they were. Each day, they patrolled in search of a ghostlike enemy who planted mines to maim them. When a Marine was struck down, the others bound his wounds, stood guard while he was evacuated, and resumed the patrol. Each night, they returned to their caves, scratched stick figures of their kills on a wall next to the skins of coyotes, and roasted goats over their campfires, rituals little changed from that of war parties centuries ago.

Based on the platoon’s hand-printed log, two embeds, and months of interviews, I try to describe what 3rd Platoon did. In six months, 3rd Platoon conducted about 400 foot patrols and engaged in 171 firefights. Imagine being on one patrol, and then another and another, always expecting to be blown to bits. Had these Marines been policemen anywhere in the States, the intensity of their battles would have made front-page news every week. To 3rd Platoon, each week only meant a few more stories shared around the campfire.

In Vietnam, our casualties were more numerous, because many more of us were fighting. But we didn’t have it harder. Today’s grunts are more muscular than we were back then, but not as good-looking. Aside from that, the differences aren’t great. In a platoon then and now, you lived, laughed, fought, killed, and died in about the same numbers.

Seven decades ago, my uncle, Sgt. Walter West, gave me a picture of the 1943 assault against the island of Tarawa. Sgt. Alex Deykeroff, who appears in this book, has that same picture on his Facebook page. Time does not separate Sergeant Deykeroff in Afghanistan from Sergeant West in the Pacific islands or from me in Vietnam or from my son who fought in Iraq. Marines have gone to war before us, with us, and after us. The dead, the living, and the unborn are links in an unbroken Marine tradition of service in war.

The infantry—specifically Marine grunts—comprise the heart of this book. The theme is cohesion, how one platoon—fifty young men—fused into a resolute fighting machine. Third Platoon knew we were pulling out of Afghanistan. Yet they didn’t slack off. When their leaders fell, they raised up new ones and continued to attack. Six months of daily patrolling. One million steps, with steady losses from start to finish.

Who are these men? What spirit sustained them?

The Setting

Sangin was the most violent district in Afghanistan, a remote farmland in southern Helmand Province at the bottom of the country. Beginning in 2006, British forces defended the government compound next to the district market, while the Taliban controlled the outlying fields where poppy was grown in abundance. To profit from the opium export, the Taliban planted thousands of land mines around the British outposts and attacked every patrol that sallied forth. Afghan officials never ventured beyond the market. Helicopters provided resupply only at night. Daylight flying was too dangerous. By 2010, Sangin was isolated and under siege.