One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War by Bing West Read Free Book Online Page B

plus.
    Garcia was learning the fight by walking the ground. But 3rd Platoon didn’t want to lose two commanders in a row. Throughout the patrol, the Marines called him “Garcia,” not out of disrespect but so that the locals couldn’t single him out. Garcia was having none of it.
    “Here’s how it is,” Garcia told the platoon. “We step off together, and come back together. I take my chances equally with you. But I’m not ‘Garcia’ to any of you. You call me Lieutenant regardless of where we are.”
    Day 8. 48,000 Steps
    Captain Johnson sent the platoon north to work out of Patrol Base Fires. PB Fires was an isolated, disintegrating farmhouse enclosed in barbed wire, located in sector Q1E in the center of the Green Zone. Third Platoon was expected to control the Green Zone from the Helmand River in the west to Kilo Company’s headquarters at Inkermanin the east. First Platoon would operate from Inkerman, while 2d Platoon eventually moved up to Outpost Transformer, a mile north on 611.
    As soon as they arrived, Garcia took most of 3rd Platoon out on a large patrol. Amid the thick corn stalks, the Marines could see only a few feet. So Garcia adjusted by splitting the patrol into two sections. One hacked down fighting positions in the sedge and lay ready to fire whenever the other crossed an open spot. Within two hours, the Taliban had sneaked up behind the large unit and opened fire. In the ensuing melee, the Marines killed two men with AKs and two farmers, and Cpl. Hughie, a sniper, took a bullet in his left arm.
    Again the inevitable had happened. Panicked farmers had stood erect and tried to run away, unaware they were caught inside the kill zones of the invisible lines of bullets unleashed by both sides. The only way to avoid enfilade fire is to dig down and never stand up, a technique the farmers didn’t understand. On the platoon’s way back to Fires, survivors came forward to complain bitterly about their dead, their terrorized families, and the damage to their crops. Stay out of the fields, they urged the Marines, use the paths. We must know where you are to avoid this.
    Garcia shook his head no. The Marines would not walk where they could be easily seen or tracked. They would not go where they were expected. Instead, they would move through the corn every day. When the shooting erupted, some crops would be destroyed and some workers in the fields might die.
    The Marines were extra-careful when they were returning to Fires. A circle of barbed wire enclosed their farmhouse. The Marines varied where they exited the wire, and the Taliban didn’t dare set up fixed positions to surround the fort. The platoon mortar teams would gleefully destroy such occupied positions.
    Out in the Green Zone, every patrol was eventually seen. The farmers told the spotters, or dickers, who carried the Icom handheldradios sold in Pakistan for thirty U.S. dollars. The patrols zigzagged unpredictably, but at the end of the day they all returned to base dripping sweat and exhausted. The Taliban learned to lurk near Fires in order to shoot at the backs of the Marines as they trudged across the open space in front of the barbed wire. Sometimes the sniping was so good that the final few Marines had to crawl back inside the wire. No one was hit during the first week, but the reverse siege was unnerving.

    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