One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War Read Online Free

One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War
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before reaching FOB Jackson, 3/5 had lostLance Cpl. John Sparks, twenty-three. He was shot and killed on a rooftop. He had grown up in a Chicago public housing complex and had hoped to join the Chicago police after his tour.
    Now, an hour after arriving at Jackson, Smith had been shot at. In response, three Marines from the sniper section slipped into the nearby cornfields to conduct a quick security patrol. Moving quietly, they glanced down a row of corn and saw a man crouching with an AK, looking in the opposite direction. Two snipers dropped him with a “frame shot,” each putting a bullet in the man’s torso. Seconds later, a second man popped out of the corn and tried to drag the body away. They shot him too.
    While Smith was out on that patrol with Cpl. Jordan Laird and Cpl. Jacob Ruiz, a massive mine shattered a 35,000-pound vehicle called an MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected),killing four Marines. All were on their first combat deployment.
    By the end of the first day, Battalion 3/5 had takenfive fatalities.

    Marine units are organized on a simple three-part system. Forged over hundreds of battles, the system is focused downward and decentralized. The regiment, commanded by Kennedy, had three battalions. The 3/5 battalion, commanded by Morris, had three rifle companies. Each company had three rifle platoons. Each forty-four-man platoon had three squads. Each thirteen-man squad was divided into three four-man fire teams. In the field, a platoon usually had several attachments like engineers and snipers.
    Sangin was shaped like a rectangle fifteen kilometers long and four kilometers wide. (See Map 1 .) A copious flow of water fed thousands of irrigation ditches stretching from the Helmand River to Route 611. The vast expanse of well-watered fields stretching from the river to the road was called the Green Zone.
    Morris sent his third company—Kilo—two kilometers north up 611 to an outpost called Inkerman, named for a fallen British soldier. Kilo’s job was to control the Green Zone, where the Taliban were familiar with every field, ditch, compound, and back trail. They knew where they had planted IEDs and where they left open lanes.
    Capt. Nick Johnson, the commander of Kilo Company, was a big, no-nonsense man with a keen interest in warfighting. The instructors back in the States had stressed reaching out to village elders and funding projects at the hamlet level. But with five killed on Day 1, he immediately shifted his focus to small-unit jungle tactics. His task was to clear from Inkerman on 611 to the Helmand River, a three-kilometer by three-kilometer rectangle.
    Johnson initially kept two platoons at Inkerman and one at Outpost/Patrol Base Fires, an isolated fort one kilometer inside the Green Zone. Intent upon sending out several patrols daily, Johnson provided the platoons with maps that broke up the Green Zone into sectorsdesignated by different sets of letters. This made it easier to direct reinforcements or indirect fire.

    Day 2. 12,000 Steps
    The next morning,a squad of thirteen Marines set off from Inkerman to scout to the northwest. When the squad was pinned down by two enemy machine guns, asecond squad moved forward to help and was engaged from the flanks. Once linked together, the two squads threw out enough fire to prevent the Taliban from closing on them. Steady fire coming from different angles forced the squads to duck into an irrigation ditch. Unable to pull back, they radioed for help. In response, Sgt. Sean Johnson left Patrol Base Fires to flank the enemy with his squad.
    “Hey, Sean,” Sgt. Matt Abbate, the leader of a ten-man sniper section, called out, “we’ll tag along to provide covering fire.”
    Drenched in sweat, Abbate had just returned from patrol. But the offer was typical of him. Of the seventy-odd sergeants in the battalion, Abbate, twenty-six, was the best liked. One Marine joked that Abbate was “the battalion mascot.” An honor graduate from the reconnaissance
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