OPINION:
ONE MILLION STEPS: A MARINE PLATOON AT WAR
By Bing West
Random House, $27, 320 pages
Perhaps the definitive account of Marine Corps infantry in combat is Eugene Sledge’s “With the Old Breed,” a report of his experiences in the final brutal island battles of World War II in the Pacific as a member of the Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment (3/5). Sledge earned the nickname “Sledgehammer.” Sledge’s account is required reading for young Marines in his evocation of the sights, sounds and grinding misery of infantry combat. Three generations later, Bing West recounts the story of Kilo Company, Fifth Marines’ Third Platoon, which took its call sign “Sledgehammer” to live up to the expectations of their predecessors in the Marine Corps, their regiment and their battalion in Afghanistan’s brutal Sangin district. They met that demanding standard in 2011. This book is a searing read, but it is one that all Americans should undertake. We send our sons into battle, and few know what our warriors experience.
The Third Platoon fought for seven months in an area called the Green Zone in one of the most vicious areas of Afghanistan. It was the heart of the Pashtun region of the southern portion of Afghanistan. Virtually every Pashtun resident had someone fighting for the Taliban, and they had a hatred for all outsiders. The mission of the Marines was to clear the Taliban as part of a “clear, hold and build” strategy to give the Afghan government a chance to control the district. They killed the Taliban in droves, but when they left, there was no follow-on hold and build. This was fighting of the kind Sledge saw 70 years ago; the technology has changed somewhat, but the nature of war has not.
The Marines of Third Platoon had different backgrounds than did the Marines of the “Greatest Generation” of seven decades ago or the Marines of Vietnam a half-century in the past that Mr. West fought beside. They were not the cross-section of America that fought World War II or the overrepresented “unfortunate sons” who could not get college deferments in the Vietnam era. The platoon was overwhelmingly white or Hispanic and middle class. All were high school graduates. Seventy-five percent of American youth today do not qualify for military service owing to the lack of physical fitness, drug use or criminal records. The Sledgehammers were definitely not a cross-section of America, but what they did have in common with their predecessors was a fierce determination to live up to the legendary reputation of their regiment and their corps. In that, they succeeded wildly.
Mr. West is a Vietnam-era Marine Corps veteran who, in many ways has become the Homer of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has accompanied Marines from the march up to Baghdad in 2003 to the Vietnam-like terrain of Sangin. He became a high-level Reagan-era official in the 1980s, and in the ’90s he worked hard with those of us leading Marine Corps experimentation to make the Marine “grunts” more effective than his Marines had been in Vietnam. Most of the Marines in Third Platoon probably had no idea that the old guy accompanying them had a hand in developing the GPS and communications gear that they used or the small unmanned aerial systems that gave them better situational awareness.
The platoon and the regiment as a whole adapted quickly to the vicious battlefield and its equally treacherous residents. This was not a hearts-and-mind effort. The regiment’s job was to kill Taliban, and it got very good at it, but the cost was appalling. More than half of the Third Platoon’s Marines became casualties during their tour, and two died. Like “With the Old Breed,” this is not an easy book to read. Its account of the misery and terror of infantry combat is unsparing. The title suggests that the Marines walked a million steps during their tour, and any one of those steps could end with a sniper’s bullet or an explosion from an improvised explosive device.
Mr. West’s final chapter is devoted to an analysis of the strategic leadership of the war that put the Third Platoon in the Green Zone, and it is equally unsparing. The political and military leadership of the war was not worthy of the troops who fought it. Gen. Stanley McChrystal does not come off well, but Mr. West’s most scathing criticism falls on Barack Obama, whose war leadership is perhaps the worst of any president in our nation’s history. An army of lions led by a lamb can only do so much.
Gary Anderson, a retired Marine Corps colonel, is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. He has been a civilian adviser in Iraq and Vietnam with the Department of State.
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