After Sangin - Part 3

War Makes Monsters of Us All

How do you measure success in a place like Sangin? What does winning look like?

After 3/7’s turnover with 1/5, I found posted in my office a copy of LtCol Savage’s command philosophy. Its focus was winning… not just winning the campaign in the valley, but overall – as a life philosophy. I couldn’t disagree with anything he wrote.

But the situation in Sangin wasn’t so black and white. My intelligence and operations officers were forever showing me multi-colored “heat charts” that measured everything from enemy activity to local support for our scores of civil affairs projects across the district. A lot of work went into developing, interpreting, and briefing the charts, but ultimately they weren’t worth the toner that colored the pages or the paper on which they were printed.

The situation fluctuated daily. The various shades of red, yellow, and green blended into each other. Green areas, denoting reduced or no enemy activity, regularly – and inexplicably – turned red, and vice versa. It was fluid.

With most openly hostile fighters absent for the winter, the best metrics we could reference were our number of interdictions – targeting and killing IED emplacers with the aid of persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and precision-guided munitions – and our “strike-to-find” ratio. In other words, how many Marines were triggering IEDs versus how many we were discovering and reducing with our explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team before the device detonated.

The metrics briefed well.

But by deployment’s end we had only targeted and eliminated a fraction of the valley’s IED layers. And, despite an impressive tally of locating and reducing more than 1,000 explosive devices, we still lost five Marines to the buried bombs, with scores more wounded during our seven months.

The strike-to-find ratio didn’t brief so well when it came time to write letters home to the families of the fallen.

#

With its strong base of Sangin vets, 3/7 was well-prepared for its 2011 deployment.

I was less so.

Becoming a battalion commander had been the goal since my time in company command. Now, armed with the knowledge of what lay ahead, I wasn’t as prepared as I thought.

Regardless, as 3/7 trained for its return to Helmand, I ruthlessly enforced the mantra LtCol Bill McCollough had imparted to me after his return from commanding 1/5 in Nawa in 2009: conventional military operations are the foundation of counterinsurgency operations.

It was another permutation of Gen James Mattis’ insistence on “brilliance in the basics.” The idea was simple: you can’t conduct effective counterinsurgency operations without a mastery of basic infantry skills. Things like population centers of gravity, ASCOPE-PMESII analysis, and Money as a Weapon System were useless if Marines couldn’t conduct proper security patrols or man guard towers or call for and control supporting arms.

The discipline required for conventional infantry operations was magnified in a place like Sangin. We used to talk about the “strategic corporal” – the idea that a junior leader’s actions on the modern battlefield could have an outsized effect on the overall campaign once CNN broadcast it to the world.

In 2011, when the average Marine (and Afghan) had a mobile device with Facebook on speed-dial, it was now the “strategic rifleman” who could be the gamechanger. Any Marine’s actions – especially something that might not brief well, like urinating on dead Taliban fighters or posing with a Nazi SS flag – could potentially derail everything we were doing.

#

3/7 was a disciplined force when it returned to Sangin in 2011.

How could it not be? With leaders like SgtMaj Troy Black, who had helped lead the 2010 deployment and who snapped me in when I joined the unit, it would have been almost impossible for the battalion to be otherwise. But the stress and strain of counterinsurgency eventually took its toll on everyone.

The pressure cooker of Sangin was overpowering, whether it was the grunts walking endless patrols through the canals, corn fields, tree lines, and alleys, or the S-1 clerks processing the almost daily personnel casualty reports detailing the death and dismemberment of their comrades.

That stress and strain seeped into everything the Marines did, and every day they walked a fine line between darkness and light.

Anything was a potential trigger: a Marine stepping on an IED; interacting with nearby villagers who almost certainly knew who was emplacing the devices; or the casual indifference by local civil and military leaders – not only to the campaign in the valley, but to the struggle within Afghanistan writ large.

Direct-fire engagements between Marines and the Taliban were rare during our tour – maybe fewer than a dozen or so in seven months. IED strikes were more frequent and, naturally, more enervating for all of us.

It was a rare occasion when we could target a Taliban fighter whom we knew for certain had 3/7 blood on his hands. When we did – and met success – the smoking remains became a cause for raucous celebration.

No one was immune from it… me included.

Once, in December 2011, I stood over the stiffened body of a dead fighter we had killed with a precision artillery strike the previous night. When I saw the pinkish glob of his brains laying in a pile on the ground ten feet away from his empty skull, my feelings bordered on elation. Then, when my sergeant major called it payback for the first Marine we lost at the beginning of the deployment, I could only agree with him and laugh.

War makes monsters of us all.

# # #

Stay tuned for Part 4.