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

Swartz to the safe ground.There were now three wounded who urgently needed blood transfusions, plus one dying and one dead Marine.
    “Sergeant Abbate,” Ruiz yelled, “helos inbound in five mikes!”
    Abbate again took the Vallon and walked through the soft dirt for about fifty meters to an open spot where the helicopters could land. As the wounded and dead were carried to the landing zone, he realized the northwest flank was unguarded. He ran back along the path he had cleared, grabbed three Marines, and led them forward to cover the flank.
    As soon as the
whump-whump
of helicopter blades could be heard, LCpl. Willie Deel saw a farmer in a brown man-dress dart out of a cornfield, pointing upward with an RPG. Seeing Deel aim in at him, the man ducked back into the corn. From the other side of a minefield, the Taliban could shoot carefully as the helos fluttered down. The enemy intensified their machine gun fire.
    There wasn’t time to find a route through the irrigation ditches to attack from the flank, and to slowly sweep a path with the Vallon across the field guaranteed being hit. LCpl. Mario Launder, a fire team leader, watched as Abbate picked up his rifle, scrambled up the canal bank, and without looking back headed out into the field toward the enemy position. After advancing several meters, Abbate realized he was alone. He stopped, turned around, and shouted.
    “Let’s go! We all die together!”
    Launder’s squad leaped up and moved behind him.
    Seeing the Marines running toward them, the enemy slipped into a shallow canal and pulled back. No IEDs exploded. Perhaps none had been set in the field, or maybe the Marines were just plain lucky.
    With only a few bullets incoming, two helos landed in fast succession and took off with the casualties. One helo was diverted to pick up the body of LCpl. IrvinCeniceros, twenty-one, from Alaska, killed in another fight a few kilometers south.
    After the medevac birds left, Abbate grabbed a machine gun andtook up post as the rear guard. He was the last man to reenter the wire back at Patrol Base Fires.
    That wasn’t the end of it. The Taliban had blown a sluice gate a few hundred meters to the west, allowing a tributary from the Helmand River to flood in. The fields outside PB Fires were chest-deep in water. By late afternoon, the rising water was lapping inside the wire. With the fort almost underwater, the Taliban crept closer, shooting from all sides. The Marines furiously returned fire. They sent out a patrol to flank the enemy to the east. The Taliban easily avoided them, while maintaining constant fire. When the patrol returned to Fires and ammunition was redistributed, the defenders were down to one magazine per rifle.
    Back at Inkerman, Capt. Nick Johnson organized an emergency working party.
    “Everybody not on watch,” LCpl. Jaspar Jones, who was at the headquarters, said, “went on that working party. We had to get ammo out to Fires. All of us wanted to help.”
    They loaded the munitions into a truck and drove until it mired down. Then they strapped ammo boxes on their backs and trudged forward. Captain Johnson toted one hundred pounds of .50 caliber ammo by himself. By the third trip, he was exhausted. For three hours, the working party staggered, slipped, and slid in thigh-deep mud from the truck to the fort. When they could carry no more individually, they slung the ammo boxes on poles, shouldered by two of them.
    After the pile of ammo was waist-high, Johnson called together the sopping Marines.
    “I know what you’re feeling,” he said. “Losing buddies to IEDs sucks. The Taliban believe they’ve cut you off and that we’ll leave. No way we’ll do that. In 1950, this battalion broke out of the Chosin Reservoir,in temperatures twenty below, surrounded by thousands of Chinese. We can’t fail them. You have to stay and break out.”
    Gunnery Sgt. Christopher Carlisle, imposing in stature and voice, stomped around the fort, clasping the shaken