“What does Sangin mean? They sent us there to fight—so we fought.”
—GEN. JOHN KELLY, U.S. MARINE CORPS
The members of 3rd Platoon possessed the warrior spirit expected of Marines. They did not focus 95 percent of their effort upon friendly persuasion. Indeed, their aggressive, almost obsessive focus upon destroying the enemy seemed to contradict the restrained strategy of the high command. Third Platoon was determined to win. To them, that meant walking across the poppy fields without stepping on a mine or being shot at. That was a limited but practical definition of winning.
Placed in counterinsurgency context, 3rd Platoon was in the “clearing” phase, with “holding” by Afghan forces and “building” by Afghan government employees to follow. Whether that process would be carried out was beyond the time frame and control of 3rd Platoon. How Sangin evolved—whether it progressed or regressed—depended upon the interaction among the Taliban, the tribes, and the Afghan army after the Americans left. The American strategy of protecting the population with an ever-expanding oil spot had postponed but not canceled that time of reckoning, when the Afghans would fight and barter among themselves. One thing was certain: the ferocity and cohesion of 3rd Platoon, which was welded together like steel plates, sprung from factors not attributable to the uncertain strategy.
Sangin: The Setting
After 3/5 left in 2011, four more Marine battalions rotated through Sangin district. By late 2012, the Taliban had largely stopped shooting and planting mines. Beaten down, the Taliban had decided not to contest the American troops patrolling inside the district. By staying on the offensive for two years, the Marines had won the battle of attrition.
“Violence has subsided,” according to a 2012 article in the Marine Corps Times, “… but the overall U.S. toll in Sangin is staggering. More than 50 Marines have been killed here in fewer than two years. At least 500 more have been severely wounded. In practical terms, a half of a battalion in amputees has been created here.”
Was Sangin worth the cost? In 2011, 3rd Platoon did not believe they had won the trust or support of the villagers. Nor did the battalions that came after them. Although the Taliban ruled mostly by fear, they had put down deep roots that sprang back to life as the Marines pulled out.
By the fall of 2013, travel along Route 611 above Outpost Transformer was once again perilous.
“Sangin is like an open space for the Taliban,” the district governor said in September of 2013. “Anyone can enter, and anyone can leave.”
The Taliban were sneaking back in again, launching ambushes inside the very markets constructed by the British six years earlier to motivate the farmers to reject the Taliban. The Afghan battalion replacing the Marines received a cold reception from the farmers.
“It’s difficult to find local people who are against the Taliban,” an Afghan colonel told a New York Times reporter. “This place [Sangin] is like a prison.”
Sergeant Deykeroff posted the article on his Facebook page, with a three-word comment: “same old Sangin.” The reversion showed how deeply the tentacles of the Taliban extended. The farmers weren’t innocents yearning for freedom from the Taliban. Growing opium corroded the collective soul of the community. Afghanistan had the highest percentage of drug addicts in the world. The individual farmer knew he was destroying the lives of others. He knew the names and families of the dazed, thin men wandering around his village. There were no starving farmers in the fertile Green Zone. The rich soil grew whatever was planted—corn, melons, sunflowers, wheat, tomatoes, pomegranates, marijuana, poppy.
The farmer pleaded that opium was Inshallah—God’s will. The estate owners in Kabul, the Taliban, the buyers from Pakistan—they were responsible for what the poor farmer planted. In his view, the farmer could no more rebel against the Taliban than he could refuse to plant poppy. Besides, poppy paid four times more than wheat.
The Taliban were part of a soiled social fabric that extended from Karzai downward. Their control over Sangin, where no Afghan official arrested a Taliban, could not be changed by Americans. Commanders at the top claimed the population switched sides. After the Thanksgiving battle, though, 3rd Platoon knew that the farmers threw in with the winners. No matter how momentarily dominant, the Marines were forever transient outsiders. Only Afghans could repair the damage their complicity had wrought upon their own society.
A majority in 3rd Platoon believed Afghanistan would remain a mess when they left. They were correct. By the end of 2013, the Afghan army had handed several outposts in Sangin over to the Taliban.
“Local residents and officials described a bizarre scene in the Sangin bazaar,” The New York Times reported in December of 2013. “… Around midday, the Afghan Army arrived in an armored convoy, bearing Taliban commanders known to the locals. The men walked through the stalls, introducing the men and sharing laughs, witnesses said.”
By mid-2014, there were no British or Americans in Sangin. The Taliban had remained. No Afghan soldier ventured into the Green Zone.
“It’s sad,” Vic Garcia said, “really sad.”
The battle for Sangin failed in its strategic objective. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and hundreds of lives lost in the district over twelve years. The objective was to open Route 611 from Sangin to the Kajacki Dam in order to install another turbine. That did not happen. In the end, the district receded and became a besieged outpost.
“We left Sangin with a sense of accomplishment,” Sibley said. “Our losses weren’t in vain. We made progress. Now [three years later] … I don’t want to talk about it.”
Tom Schueman, the 1st Platoon commander, summarized the conflicting feelings.
“There were some good people among the farmers,” he said, “but not the Taliban. Looking back, I had the worst time, and the best. It was my greatest honor.”
In January of 2014, Battalion 3/5 lost their twenty-sixth brother. In early 2011, an IED in Sangin had sheared off the legs of Cpl. Farrell Gilliam, twenty-five, from Fresno, California. Farrell had wanted to be a Marine since he was in the fourth grade. For four more years, he fought off massive infections and underwent thirty operations. In 2014, he took his own life.
“The war doesn’t stop just because they come home,” his mother said. “The war is not over for them. It still rages on in their hearts and in their heads and physical bodies.”
The Strategy
In 2001, we went to war to destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. When the terrorists escaped into Pakistan, Mr. Bush massively enlarged and changed the mission.
“Write this down,” he said. “Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.”
The question was how to destroy Al Qaeda. The answer was to build two democracies in the Islamic, authoritarian Middle East. In Afghanistan, at a cost of 2,400 American dead and one trillion dollars, we did not succeed in destroying Al Qaeda, or defeating the Taliban, or creating a true democracy. Our basic mistake was handing over freedom as a gift and doing the fighting for others. Our intention was good; our wisdom was bad.
Our military commanders willingly agreed to expand their mission. The defining document was the 2006 field manual on counterinsurgency, which was widely praised by academics and the mainstream media for its emphasis upon constructing rather than destroying. “Soldiers and Marines,” the manual instructed, are expected to be “nation-builders as well as warriors.” Our most revered generals embraced the mission of changing the Afghan culture.
While running for president in 2008, Mr. Obama had insisted, “Afghanistan is the war that must be won.” But Mr. Obama and his White House staff did not trust our commanders. He felt they were trying to trap him into rubber-stamping their decisions. As commander in chief, he did not stand behind his troops. He made it clear his heart wasn’t in the fight. By December of 2009, he had downgraded the mission from “defeating” to “diminishing” the Taliban.
“What was interesting was the metamorphosis,” National Security Adviser James L. Jones said in December of 2009. “I dare say that none of us ended up where we started.”
“Metamorphosis” was a pompous word for pulling out without accomplishing a specific goal. Mission clarity and confidence decayed. In 2010, Secretary of Defense Gates replaced the top commander in Kabul with General McChrystal, who ordered the troops to focus upon winning over the population rather then defeating the Taliban.
To reduce civilian casualties, he severely restricted coalition firepower. Although the Taliban inflicted six times more civilian fatalities, President Karzai escalated his rants about American-caused casualties and released those imprisoned for killing Americans. The Pashtun tribes never came over to our side. Rather than positively altering Afghan attitudes, McChrystal negatively affected the attitudes of his own troops.
McChrystal was replaced by General Petraeus. Distrusting our military, Obama had extracted from Petraeus his assurance that a surge of American troops would yield success within eighteen months—by about January of 2011. Obama put in 30,000 more troops, bringing the U.S. total to 100,000. According to Secretary Gates, both military and civilian officials agreed that this number provided “a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy.” Actually, twice that number was needed to control thousands of Pashtun villages in a mountainous country the size of Texas. Petraeus persisted with expanding the “oil spot” deployment of U.S. troops that risked clearing districts beyond the areas Afghan forces were willing to control once we left.
Sangin was the inevitable overreach of a strategy blindly willful and excessively ambitious. Operational success in Sangin required the installation of a turbine at the Kajacki Dam. That never had a chance of happening unless the Marines stayed. So why were they sent there, knowing the Afghan soldiers could not hold open the road to the dam?
The most elementary risk assessment would include four enormous obstacles to victory: an unreliable Afghan government; Pashtun tribes not amenable to persuasion; a vast country requiring hundreds of thousands of troops; and a secure sanctuary for the enemy.
There was an alternative to “full-fledged, fully resourced counterinsurgency.” Early on, several experienced commanders had put forth credible proposals based on lessons from Vietnam. The basic concept was to place conventional small units under the leadership of Special Forces, creating task forces to work intensively with the Afghan forces, at a fraction of the size and cost of our standard force structure. As the Afghan military was trained, our military would get out, leaving Kabul politics to the State Department. That was the road not taken.
Instead, in 2009, Secretary of Defense Gates said, “We are in this thing to win.” But by 2011, he had concluded that our troops could do only two things: kill the enemy and train Afghan soldiers. He concluded that nation building was unattainable. Yet he appointed commanders—McChrystal and Petraeus—who ardently believed it was attainable. The contradiction has not been explained. All three were honorable, dedicated men who tried to do too much.
As Gates desired, the Marines in Helmand did severely attrite the Taliban. Colonel Kennedy called his approach “Big Stick COIN,”meaning his goal was to destroy the Taliban. This was what Gates wanted. But the secretary of defense also believed the Marines were fighting in the wrong places—like Sangin—and resisted being placed under the top command of McChrystal. Gates wondered if their sacrifices were in vain. But he never addressed his misgivings directly with the Marine generals.
Much worse, our high command dithered, unable to decide whether the Taliban was a distraction or a mortal enemy like Al Qaeda.
Marine General Kelly said, “our country today is in a life and death struggle against an evil enemy,” engaged in “pursuit day and night into whatever miserable lair Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their allies might slither into.”
Kelly was clear: kill the bastards. McChrystal, who was his boss, held the opposite view.
“The conflict will be won,” he wrote, “by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy.”
Which was it? Were we in a death struggle with the Taliban, or were they a legitimate force in Afghan politics, deserving to share in the political power? No nation should ever go to war without the will to defeat the enemy.
Our top command praised the warrior spirit of our Special Forces. The American public responded accordingly. Amazon sold 400 books about the SEALs—more books than there were SEALs in all of Afghanistan. Our commandos were lauded for attacking the Taliban.
General McChrystal ordered our conventional units to spend only 5 percent of their effort killing the enemy. This conveyed the message that the conventional grunt was second-rate, not expected to strike fear into his enemies. A warrior has to hold within himself the desire –the thirst—to kill his opponent. Lacking that, he is in the wrong job. A grunt must walk onto every battlefield to win.
“Troops risking their lives,” Secretary Gates wrote, “need to be told that their goal is to ‘defeat’ those trying to kill them.”
Defeating the Taliban was impossible because Pakistan provided them with aid and sanctuary. After Vietnam, our military vowed never again to fight a war while granting a sanctuary to the enemy. In thirteen years, fifteen different generals served as the top coalition commander in Afghanistan. Several dozen other generals served under their commands. Yet not one general resigned or spoke out. We beat on against the tide, set on automatic by a refusal to review basic assumptions.
Despite the fine-sounding rhetoric of the generals, 3rd Platoon and all the other grunts were engaged in a war of attrition. The hope was that our forces would kill so many Taliban that their ranks could not be fully replenished, allowing the Afghan army to hold the remnants at bay. In Sangin and elsewhere, our conventional troops were engaged in slow-pitch attrition, accepting losses to IEDs in order to occasionally kill Taliban who chose to initiate contact. At the same time, our Special Operations Forces practiced fast-pitch attrition by means of heliborne night raids that minimized IED casualties.
Both methods inflicted steady casualties upon the enemy. By 2014, our commanders were saying the Taliban strength had fallen, giving hope to the Afghan army. Such success was in spite of, rather than because of, the counterinsurgency strategy. War, by definition, is a process of attrition. When it becomes the strategic goal, commanders have lost their way. Attrition is the absence of strategy.
In place of an exit strategy, Mr. Obama simply exited without a strategy, by moving the goalposts. In 2001, the objective for the invasion was to prevent terrorists from using Afghanistan as a safe haven. In 2014, Obama did away with that objective. The new goal, he said, was to show “resolve that terrorists do not launch attacks against our country.”
Because resolve can be demonstrated by a speech, the Taliban no longer had to be defeated in battle. In place of deeds, words sufficed. He preemptively pledged in 2014 that all U.S. forces would leave Afghanistan before his term ended in 2016, regardless of what happened on the ground.
“This is how,” Mr. Obama said, “wars end in the twenty-first century.”
What a tangled web we weave when we deceive ourselves. The war didn’t end because Mr. Obama quit. Al Qaeda and the Taliban remained on the battlefield, undefeated. When Secretary Gates left office, he hoped Afghanistan, no longer winnable, would not “be viewed as a strategic defeat for the United States, or as a failure with global consequences.”
Such a disastrous defeat appears unlikely. Marines at the grunt level did not believe the Afghan army would hold on to the Green Zone, yet the generals reported progress. Both perspectives are probably correct: the Taliban will dominate in the Green Zone, but the Afghan army can hang on to district headquarters and the cities, if we provide funding and air support. For $5 billion to $10 billion a year, we can avoid a collapse like the one symbolized in the 1975 photo of despairing Vietnamese clutching at the last helicopter leaving the American embassy in Saigon.
In a subdued speech at West Point in May of 2014 aimed at explaining his foreign policy, Mr. Obama declared, “America’s character … will always triumph.”
Avoiding a humiliating defeat is not a triumph of the American character. Mr. Obama was an irresolute commander in chief. Pledging that all U.S. military forces will leave by 2016 was the act of a politician, not a statesman. Our generals tried to do too much, and our commander in chief settled for too little. After 2016, a duplicitous Pakistan will exert more influence in Kabul than will the United States. The Taliban, the drug syndicates, the Kabul kleptocracy, and the Pakistanis will cut murky deals. Afghanistan will gradually fade from the consciousness of the American public.
For what enduring gain did we expend so much blood and treasure? The test of success is whether you would fight the war over again with the same strategy. No military commander would repeat our Afghan strategy.
Combat Cohesion
While our generals pursued the quixotic strategy of a benevolent war, our grunts remained loyal, tough, and realistic. Third Platoon fought the hardest sustained campaign of the war. One million steps, with death or amputation awaiting each step. Despite knowing the strategy made little sense, they did not falter or pull back.
I knew Colonel Kennedy was up to something when he first dropped me off with 3rd Platoon. As an old grunt, I could see the steel in them. But where did their resolve—and that of other platoons like them—come from? Who fights for us, and why?
To begin with, combat effectiveness has little to do with morality. Third Platoon didn’t fight well because they believed in democracy. The Spartans and Romans fought skillfully to enslave others. German soldiers fought well for Hitler.
Patriotism or nationalism, however, is a powerful motivator. Cpl. Jacob Ruiz had endured a lengthy investigation after BBC video showed him shooting a man. I asked him what message he wanted to convey about serving in Sangin. He had a right to be angry, so his answer surprised me.
Ruiz said, “We’ll do anything asked of us.”
Third Platoon understood that they weren’t pursuing, to put it mildly, the benevolent strategy of the high command.
“This war’s stupid,” Mad Dog Myers said. “Well, so what? Our country’s in it.”
Their sacrifices achieved no permanent goal, and won no Afghan hearts or minds. Counterinsurgency theory was irrelevant to them.
“The mission was never about hearts and minds,” Rausch, the Midwesterner with the Commandant’s coin, said. “We were there to fight.”
Other coalition platoons—American, British, Dutch—may have been more understanding of the population. But no platoon controlled more of the Green Zone. “War,” to quote columnist Kathleen Parker, “demands victory rather than understanding.” If you are not willing to fight, don’t come to Sangin. They were going to own the land on which they walked. That meant killing the Taliban. That was their objective.
“For thousands of years,” Jordan Laird said, “there’s been a group of people that has been set apart. They’re the warrior class.”
Third Platoon fought inside the structure of the Marine Corps. They embraced its traditions of discipline and toughness. They all wanted to be Marines, some since grammar school. Each had chosen to fight before he met those who would fight alongside him. In the Marine Corps, they learned how to shoot, obey orders, plan, and adapt. Everyone had a job, and every job focused on destroying the enemy. They believed in their tribe, “the few, the proud.”
On November 10, the Marine Corps celebrates its birthday with pomp-and-circumstance balls at 135 American embassies and in cities across America. At one ball, the CEO of a major corporation watched as corporals and their wives walked up to the head table to chat with the commanding general and link arms for a photo.
“This rarely happens in the corporate world,” he said.
A good military leader forms close ties with his unit. Tradition, heritage, and camaraderie unite the ranks. Those factors apply across the board. In themselves, they don’t explain 3rd Platoon’s singular tenacity.
They weren’t fighting for their squad buddies, hoping just to stay alive. If that were their objective, they would have stayed close to Fires. Instead, they pushed steadily farther out.
But they were calculating about each move. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes fought in the Civil War. Reflecting on that titanic struggle, he wrote, “To fight a war you must believe in something and want something with all your might.” That was certainly true in World War II of the Marines who assaulted islands like Iwo Jima.
But Afghanistan was a highly limited war with elusive and changing objectives. Third Platoon was cunning. Garcia took small bites, alternately encouraging and reining in the squad leaders. The squads were careful not to be cut off. The goal was to kill without swinging with all your might and risking being caught off-balance.
Each month, the Taliban became more wary. They knew 3rd Platoon wanted to put down one or two of them a day. They referred to the platoon by name. They hated the snipers. They asked their leaders in Quetta, Pakistan, for more fighters. But the results were the same: the Marine patrols kept coming.
Why did 3rd Platoon fight with such ferocity? Successful people claim they made their own luck. Unsuccessful people complain about bad luck. The truth lies in between. Chance played a role in shaping 3rd Platoon, because each traumatizing event was offset by a counteraction. The platoon’s cohesion was reinforced whenever it most threatened to crumble.
In early October, when Lopez and Catherwood were killed, Abbate organized the shocked squad and charged through the minefield. When the Taliban flooded Fires, Kilo Company headquarters responded by carrying ammunition through fields of mud. Gunny Carlisle went from man to man, promising Fires would hold. Captain Johnson urged the numbed Marines to remember their forefathers in the frigid cold of Korea. The company’s radio call signs were Sledgehammer and Old Breed, references to Corporal Sledge on the blood-soaked island of Peleliu.
“A set of ties,” the historian Aaron O’Connell wrote, “… bound Marines together in ways not experienced by members of the larger and more diversified services. It was not only to the members of their unit that Marines remained Semper Fidelis, ‘always faithful.’ It was to an idealized and timeless community of ancestors—the entire ‘family’ of the Corps.”
The day after the flood at Fires in October, Boelk was killed and Lieutenant West was evacuated without his hand and leg. Morale was bleak. Garcia immediately took over, and his reputation bought him time with the platoon. They were willing to be led, if he stepped up. Instead of holing up at Fires, Garcia took the platoon on the offensive, showing that the Taliban couldn’t emplace IEDs everywhere. When a fight did break out, he called back to company, and Spokes Beardsley delivered two F-18s, demonstrating the overwhelming firepower on call to help them.
The snipers became part of the platoon, bagging a kill a day on patrols with the squads. The kills made a huge difference. The IED is insidious because you cannot strike back. One-sided attrition drains the best units. In the legend of Beowulf, the man-eating monster Grendel lurks in the dark green forest. Similarly, the Green Zone had gained mythic stature as the lair of the ferocious Taliban. The snipers turned it into a hunting ground.
On the daily patrols, the Marines shared the risk equally; any one of them could lose his leg or life. Through the daily kills, they shared the satisfaction of revenge. There’s no genteel way of putting it. They patrolled to kill, and they saw the results. Success provided the platoon with confidence.
They slept in caves cut off from the world. Their isolation made them more dangerous. They had only one another, and their only outlet was to kill the Taliban. Abbate’s verve was infectious. “Hellasick” made a mockery of the Taliban. “Until that day” became the platoon greeting.
The Thanksgiving battle was pivotal. The platoon ran to the sound of the guns, with the squads covering one another. Each squad leader—Esquibel, Deykeroff, Thoman, McCulloch—was a combat veteran. Mad Dog yelled for the gunships, and the gunships chopped down Belleau Wood. From that day forward, 3rd Platoon felt superior to the Taliban. The snipers carved stick figures on the wall, while every member of the platoon kept his personal count.
At night around the fire pits, every member from an incoming patrol went over what he saw, what seemed normal and what seemed out of place. The platoon developed a shared awareness of the situation around them. When they talked, they were adding texture to a common mental map, with everyone contributing.
In the first weeks, they had taken heavy casualties because they had no pattern recognition of the danger zones and likely IED hiding places. They named key terrain features like the Golf Course and Belleau Wood. When they stepped off, they had a collective image of the route they were taking and where they were likely to encounter opposition.
The platoon had depth of leadership. Like wolves, they become accustomed to the routine of the hunt. When a leader goes down, another must step forward, be accepted, and be followed. Lieutenant West went down and Garcia took his place. Sergeant Abbate went down and Browning stepped forward. Third Platoon was never without an Alpha wolf, never retreated to skulk in their caves.
The pressure of his peers motivated each Marine in the platoon. Once Garcia showed them that IEDs couldn’t be placed everywhere, the habit of aggressive patrolling solidified into a routine that no one questioned, because everyone bought into it. They believed their tribe could defeat any foe. Group spirit bound them together. During a fight, when Sergeant Dy riffed by shouting, “We’ll do it live! Fuck it!,” he was signaling confidence in the other squads. Move to contact, identify the fields of fire, improvise, respond ferociously, and move on.
Men like Garcia and Abbate were born with courage in their genes. But how was courage transferred from one man to the next? Looking back, had Abbate been killed in the early October battle, the platoon might have spiraled down. By the time of his death in December, however, a social compact gripped the platoon: win every skirmish.
With December came recognition. The platoon was proud it had been selected to move south during the cease-fire to clean out the sector called PB America. By that time, each squad had developed a tactical rhythm. Instead of being intimidated, the platoon looked forward to engaging the Taliban.
When they returned to Fires in January, the outpost’s isolation increased their bonds. They had only each other. There was no administration, no daily emails from the families, no garrison tasks, no first sergeant with a list of chores. Unlike in the rear, they didn’t live two polarizing lives; they were spared the space capsule called the Internet. They could not escape to home by clicking a mouse. Outpost Fires was their castle, and beyond the gates lived medieval tribes that spoke a foreign tongue.
The heavy rains of February gave the platoon a break by soaking the IEDs. On different occasions, four Marines avoided losing their legs when they set off low-order detonations.
In March, with the end of tour approaching, Garcia lived up to his nickname of Juggernaut by keeping the pressure on sectors like P8Q. The platoon yielded none of the ground that it had seized.
“It would have been easy to slack off,” Sibley said. “But the lieutenant was the same hardass all the way to the end.”
In summary, 3rd Platoon’s cohesion was due to inspiration (Abbate), leadership (Garcia), firepower (Beardsley), aggressiveness (McCulloch), steadiness (Esquibel), and raw spirit (Myers). The mission centered on patrolling until shot at, and then returning fire until the firefight was won. The strategic rationales—building a nation, installing a turbine at the dam, winning over the Sangin tribes—were at best flimsy. The platoon went forth to fight and kill the Taliban.
The platoon bought into Garcia’s rule: do your best. They didn’t care where each had come from, or would go once back in the States. On their tiny island called Fires, they had only one another, and one million steps to walk.
“We fought,” Yazzie said to me, “because we were so pissed off about everything.”
Yaz always looked for the clearest explanation. As he drives his macho truck to Laguna Beach, he might laugh at Aristotle’s take on the platoon’s spirit. But I doubt that he will deny it.
“We become … brave,” the philosopher wrote 2,300 years ago, “by doing brave acts.”
Finish every fight standing on the enemy’s ground.