The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  Neff graduated late that summer and moved over to the school for new lieutenants, where he sought an assignment to the military police. But the Corps had only one MP position for 250 lieutenants and gave it to another officer. He opted for a ground intelligence job. The position required two more schools, one a grueling field-and-weapons course with infantry officers, the other learning the intelligence trade. At the infantry course he finished fifth out of dozens of officers at the opening day’s endurance test taken while carrying a combat load. He was not fast, but he was a bull when weighted down, and could outlast many peers. He reported to Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, in late 2008, figuring he would deploy on the battalion staff, return to the States, pick up his honorable discharge, and move to the front of the line at a police academy back home.

  The Marine Corps is dominated by its infantry officers, college-educated Marines who have been told that they and the grunts under their command are the center of their service and the reason all of the support jobs exist. Lieutenants in infantry battalions who do not come from the infantry school or who work on the staff—those who specialize in communications, logistics, and transportation—sometimes labor in the shadows of these peers. But at least one of the battalion’s infantry lieutenants, Cory Colistra, liked what he saw in Neff.

  Colistra, who had deployed once to Iraq, played football at the Naval Academy, and had decided over time that a jock personality did not always translate well to the seriousness of war. He first met Neff at a party. Neff wore his college football sweatshirt. Inwardly, Colistra sagged. He knew the type. This guy is going to be a jerk, he thought. Colistra started a conversation and discovered Neff did not match the stereotype. He was a listener more than a talker and maintained a quiet bearing after a few beers. Neff was twenty-nine, older than most other lieutenants. Colistra thought it showed. He left the party telling himself, I can work with this guy.

  After the First Platoon commander was arrested for drunken driving, Colistra approached Kilo’s company commander, Captain Joshua Biggers, and suggested he lobby Colonel Christmas to have Neff transferred to the vacant platoon. The company would be deploying soon. Most of the unit training had been completed. Whoever was assigned to the platoon would have only a few weeks before they shipped out, and no time at all in the field. Colistra told Biggers that Neff seemed like someone they could coach, a mature officer who would take advice.

  “Sir,” Colistra said, “I think Jarrod would be a great fit.”

  After Christmas offered Neff the job, Colistra followed up, pushing Neff to accept it. Before he left that day, Neff had agreed.

  * * *

  The next day Neff stepped in front of First Platoon. Its Marines were waiting for him outside their barracks in a semicircle, warily assessing their new officer. Neff had left a meeting with Biggers, who told him he would succeed only if he jelled with his Marines, who might not accept him at first.

  Be humble, Biggers told him. Learn from your Marines.

  The platoon was not privy to this, and waited skeptically. Many of the Marines were inexperienced themselves. They had come to the battalion straight from boot camp and their own infantry course, and wanted a boss with real experience in a rifle company. All around Camp Lejeune, units were being sent to Afghanistan, and these Marines hoped their battalion would be sent there soon, too. There would be no time to break in an officer.

  The older Marines, those who returned from Iraq the previous year, were frustrated by stateside life. Their stay at home, they thought, had gone on too long. The veterans had passed too many drunken nights. They wondered if First Platoon had lost its edge. When they heard that their old lieutenant had gotten jammed up by the police, they dreaded the idea of having to figure out a replacement. Kilo Company was shorthanded and had already been told to expect new Marines from the infantry school to arrive before deployment. They spoke of the idea derisively. “Christmas presents,” they called anyone who would check into the unit right before it deployed. Boots, they said, using their service’s derisive term. Nobody wanted to go to war with boots. Now they found out they were not going to be led by a grunt. The ill will was deepened by recent history. A Marine in First Platoon had been arrested for drunken driving a few weeks before, and the old lieutenant punished everyone else with a thrashing—an especially hard physical-training session. Now that same lieutenant had been caught in a drinking incident of his own, and the battalion was cycling in a fresh face. There is an ordinary level of hostility to any newcomer in a platoon. But this case seemed extreme. Talk in the barracks was unkind.

  We’re getting an intelligence officer? This is what we’re going to Afghanistan with—an officer who has been sitting behind a desk?

  Sergeant Laney, the first squad leader and the Marine in the platoon with the most experience in combat, found the entire situation absurd. This is just wrong, he thought.

  Neff knew he’d never bluff his way past thirty grunts. He kept it brief. He introduced himself and said he knew what they were thinking.

  “I’m not coming to you from the infantry,” he said, “I’m coming to you from the S-2 shop.” He let that sink in. “I’m not going to pretend to know everything, because I don’t,” he added. He spoke bluntly. “So I’m going to stay out of your shit. The platoon sergeant will be the platoon sergeant, and the squad leaders will be the squad leaders, and that’s how it will be.”

  He did not tell the platoon that he had graduated from the same infantry course that all Marine rifle platoon commanders attend, or how he had outperformed many officers there. It was an important point. It meant he was just as certified, and had as much technical and tactical training, as any lieutenant they would get, even if he had spent most of his brief career in an office. But now was not the time to play a qualification card. These Marines would not care how he did in school. He had missed their workup. He’d be accepted only if he performed.

  He returned to his theme: The platoon’s sergeants, and its veterans from Iraq, would wield the authority they deserved. “The only time I am going to step in is if I don’t think something is right, or if something is going off the plan,” he said.

  “Now, anybody with a joke about the Red Sox can come talk with me personally.”

  This much, he knew, was unlikely. He was the biggest man in the platoon.

  He left the semicircle and headed to his new office.

  Some of the Marines gave him a nickname: “Masshole.” It matched his Boston accent and was a worthy label for any officer boss. Others gathered in the barracks, wondering whether they had just been impressed. Their new lieutenant said he would look to them for guidance. He did not act like some of the medal chasers they knew. Maybe, they thought, First Platoon would be okay.

  The next morning Neff was on base early, determined to stay low-key. He was so determined not to draw attention to himself that he withheld news of his new assignment from his girlfriend and his family. They had no idea he had taken one of the most dangerous jobs in the Corps. As far as they knew, he remained at his desk on the battalion staff. Neff did not want to trouble them, and had enough on his mind. He had a rifle platoon to lead and had to figure out how.

  * * *

  The rumors of the battalion’s next assignment were replaced with orders: It would be going to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, after the new year, so soon that there would not be time for Neff and his platoon to work together in the field.

  Captain Biggers arranged tactical decision games, in which Neff and the platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Matthew Dalrymple, could talk through missions with their squad leaders and practice planning, issuing orders, and organizing fire support and medevacs. Biggers had been enlisted before becoming an officer, and knew what made platoons work—getting the noncommissioned officers in sync with the lieutenant. He pulled Dalrymple aside and asked him to do all he could. They would be in Afghanistan in a blink. “This is a very tough situation,” he said. “No lieutenant has ever had to learn faster. Help the dude out.
”

  A few weeks before the battalion was to depart, Colonel Christmas ordered all the lieutenants to report to work on a weekday well before sunrise. He wanted to test their skills and talk with them about the tour ahead. About thirty young officers showed up. One was late and smelled of alcohol. Christmas stood in the darkness, in running shoes and shorts, and told them to follow him. He did not address the lieutenant who had been drinking. He knew what would happen.

  Christmas began to run.

  He set a quick pace, starting at a six-and-a-half-minute mile. Most Marine infantry lieutenants are fit; many are exceptionally so. Almost all of the battalion’s platoon commanders kept tight. The officer who had been drinking soon straggled, then fell far behind. Christmas said nothing. He maintained his pace, running until reaching a point about two and a half miles away. There he turned around and headed back. He ran past the straggler wordlessly. About a mile from the battalion’s headquarters, Christmas kicked into higher gear and pounded out a faster pace. Many of the lieutenants still hung at his heels, striding behind their commander in the predawn glow. Others could not keep up. This group stretched behind like an accordion. Among them was Neff. He was sober and fit but large. He could not run at the same pace as the smaller men.

  Back at the battalion area, Colonel Christmas stared at those who were behind. They trickled in over the course of a few minutes.

  When the group was intact, Christmas gave a brief speech. The battalion was headed to combat, he said, and its officers needed to lead. Marines deserved officers who would be in front in everything they did, and ready for anything they might face. He walked the lieutenants to a display of equipment and ordered them to demonstrate that they could assemble and operate the battalion’s suite of radios and weapons, and call for a simulated artillery mission or air strike.

  The commander departed, having made his point.

  Neff remained. His knowledge of the battalion’s weapons was high; his infantry-school training came back. He passed all the drills, including those that tested his skills at calling for fire support or arranging for casualty evacuation. He left determined to work on the medevac procedures even more. That’s an important one, he told himself. I need to be savvy at that.

  * * *

  Kilo Company arrived at Camp Bastion just after 3:00 A.M. on January 10, descending to NATO’s main base in southwestern Afghanistan on a flight from Kyrgyzstan. The landscape was almost unlit. It looked as empty and uninhabited as the surface of a moon. It was as if the company had “gone back in time about 10,000 years” in “only an hour and a half,” one Marine wrote in his journal. Their combat tour had begun.

  Bastion and the attached Marine Corps base, Camp Leatherneck, formed an expanse of runways, plywood shacks, and tents. Ringed by walls and wire and guarded by towers, the complex was an on-ramp to an invigorated war. Under the Obama administration’s plan, the Marine Corps had shifted its attention from western Iraq to Helmand Province and was pushing its units through. Marine infantry battalions tended to serve seven-month tours and operate at a fast pace. By 2010, as Kilo landed, many battalions were relieving others, inheriting areas that had already seen an American presence. This was not to be Kilo Company’s fate. The Corps had spent much of the previous year preparing for its assault into Marja. The attack was planned for February, and Kilo was to be one of two companies that would be helicoptered in ahead of the main force—dropped onto Taliban ground to capture and hold part of the main road network until other units arrived.

  Kilo’s Marines began preparing, first with classes on detecting hidden bombs and on the rules of engagement, which a Marine lawyer told them would be relaxed, giving them greater latitude to fight. Next came weapons training and tactical drills. On January 17 the company was flown to another Marine base, Camp Dwyer, which was home to an Afghan National Army force. There the company met the Afghan soldiers who would join it in the assault, and began side-by-side training.

  Outside the base, the Americans had built shooting ranges where grunts could adjust the day and night sights on their weapons and do combat drills. For the first time Neff had a chance to observe his squads maneuver and to see his team leaders act. He had expected this to be an important day, perhaps his only chance to see how his squads worked under arms. But his eyes were drawn less to his own platoon than to the contrast between Kilo Company and its Afghan counterparts, who seemed almost untrained.

  This is not good, he thought.

  The war was nearly a decade old. The United States had spent billions of dollars on Afghanistan’s military and police forces. Senior officers and spokespeople in Kabul and Washington spoke of Afghan units as partners who would lead Afghanistan out of gangsterism and war. The Afghans Neff saw bore little resemblance to what he had heard. They were marginally equipped and poorly led. Many did not aim their weapons when they fired; they pointed barrels in the general direction of targets and pulled the trigger, doing little more than wasting ammunition and making noise. The one clear accomplishment of their American-led training had been to teach them the English language’s foulest words. Neff noted exceptions. A few soldiers were in possession of basic military skills, and when they spoke through interpreters they had powerful personal stories, of families in remote provinces whom their army wages would feed.

  But Neff had a bad feeling. The Afghan platoon did not function as a platoon. Its soldiers did not have night-vision equipment. They relied on the Marines for food, water, and nearly everything else. They were in infrequent communication with their higher units and had little awareness of what other Afghan platoons might be doing. They all but destroyed Kilo Company’s portable toilets, soiling them with feces. And their leader did not seem concerned: As long as his soldiers acted as his servants, he was in good cheer. Some of the Marines suspected the Afghan platoon of harboring spies. Lance Corporal Niall Swider, a member of Third Squad, picked out one Afghan soldier as an informant. Each day he sat in the Marines’ smoke pit for hours, not smoking, just listening. Staff Sergeant Dalrymple watched the Afghan platoon closely and decided that its greatest competency was as part of the enemy’s infiltration operation. It carried moles hardwired into an American force. He shared as little information with the Afghans as he could. As Operation Moshtarak approached, he withheld details of the Marja plans, lest they immediately travel to the Taliban.

  * * *

  As the day for the assault neared, intelligence officers and Special Forces soldiers met Kilo’s officers and senior noncommissioned officers for briefings on the Taliban’s numbers and tactics, and to show them a videotape a confidential source had made of the Afghan bazaar. The source had driven through Marja on a moped with a hidden camera attached. The militants, according to the briefing, had toggled in and out of sight, setting up temporary roadblocks to search cars, then disappearing into the population. In all, Kilo was told, they could expect a Taliban force of hundreds of men organized into small groups, each familiar with its own turf. These cells had mastered the use of hidden bombs, including how to install pressure plates in roads and doorways and place explosives in walls that would decapitate people passing by. Some of them had machine guns, including heavy machine guns that might knock helicopters from the air. When American reconnaissance units had probed Marja’s edges by day, they were typically discovered and met by reaction forces, often within ten or fifteen minutes. At the tactical level, the briefers said, the Taliban was impressively organized.

  The platoons received maps and satellite image printouts called gridded reference graphics, or GRGs, of the area where helicopters would leave them. Kilo’s area covered two large GRG sheets, about seven and a half kilometers across. It included a dirt highway that led toward Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, about twenty miles to the east. A radio tower overlooked the bazaar, and a dirt road headed south into the poppy zone. Other paths formed a matrix of motorcycle and farm-tractor trails.

  Plans sharpened. Kilo was to land by darkness. A rifle company from anothe
r battalion from Lejeune, First Battalion, Sixth Marines, would be flown to the south at roughly the same time. Other companies would approach Marja overland from the open desert, eventually linking up with those flown in on the first day. No one knew how long it would take, but Kilo expected to be surrounded and alone for days. Once the initial fighting ended, the two battalions would establish headquarters and disperse their forces to build small outposts and patrol bases from which to reach out to farmers and their families. This last phase was intended to create what General Stanley McChrystal, the war’s latest American commander, dubbed a “government in a box”—a small official Afghan presence under American protection. In the eyes of the brass, eager to signal that the war was making progress and the host government was competent, this Afghan participation was critical—so critical that it became the basis of a lie: According to the public-relations talking points in Kabul, the Afghan military would lead the whole operation. This was crude propaganda. Everyone in Kilo knew it. Operation Moshtarak was shaping up to be a Marine operation with a few Afghan soldiers in tow.

  Kilo Company had more pressing matters with which to concern itself. Its young Marines were getting their first exposure to war via reports of casualties outside the base, including an IED that killed two Marines and wounded others from First Battalion, Sixth Marines, on January 24. These Marines had been chased into a trap. They had come under fire and sought cover in a building that had been rigged to blow. It was a chilling report, a detailing of foes capable of anticipating American movements and preparing complex defenses and attacks. Two days after hearing of it, several of Neff’s Marines watched an armored truck that had been damaged by a buried bomb being towed onto the base. Only two of eight wheels remained on the mine roller on its front end. Helmand was becoming a meat grinder, and they were about to plunge into one of its most dangerous areas. And many of Kilo’s Marines were unwell, weakened by bronchitis and strep throat—illnesses that spread in the close quarters of tent life.