A reminder

While you were out at the ballgame, shopping or the weekend BBQ, brave men and women stand ready to protect our country and others who need our help.

A member of the Female Engagement Team (FET) US Marines Cpl. Reagan Odhner and GySgt Michelle Hill from the 1st battalion 7th Marines Regiment patrol together with Afghanistan National Army (ANA) soliders in Sangin in Helmand Province, June 6, 2012. (Adek Berryadek Berry/AFP/GettyImages


Remember them as they are out there 24/7/365.  They volunteered to protect our freedoms around the world and we are safe because they stand ready to do whatever is required.

Make peace or die....Take a walk with the 1/5 Marines in Sangin

The 3/5 Marines had a tough fight in Sangin from September 2010 - May 2011. The 1/5 Marines relieved them and built upon the success of their shipmates through this summer and into the fall.

Watch the enclosed video (yes, I understand it is 17 minutes long...Watch the video and give them the time they have earned) is a view of what your US Marines have been doing out in the Shitewilds of Afghanistan. This is a small peak into how tough it can really be out there at the "tip of the spear".

I have been to Helmand and spent time with our USMC. They are doing the impossible in a harsh landscape and should make each American proud. Agree or disagree with the mission, this is the truest example of what we stand for and why we are Americans. Semper FI 1/5 Marines.

A year ago today....and then some

What were you doing a year ago today ? It was a Monday so many were going to work, taking care of the kids, running errands in preparation for Thanksgiving Day, etc.

But if I asked you specifically what you were doing a year ago today, would you be able to tell me ? Probably not as the days meld into each other as time passes and we lose memory of specific actions on a date as far back as a year ago.

I can tell you as it is a day that held much importance to me and many others.

A year ago today on November 22, 2010, I traveled to Washington, DC for the funeral of Lt. Robert M. Kelly, USMC. He had died in Afghanistan and was part of the contingent of Marines who had kept me safe while I spent time out in Helmand Province. Unknown to me at the time, was that he was also part of the Marine Battalion that I had served under while I was in Fallujah also. We were shipmates and had likely crossed paths while in Fallujah. I went to his funeral after learning of this splendid Marine's death and that he was in Afghanistan in Sangin. I had the honor of speaking with many Marines who were working in that area and they are our nation's best.

Back to the original point, a year ago I was in Washington, DC. 48 years ago, I was a small child at home when the news broke that we had lost President Kennedy in Dallas. I can't tell you much about that day other than my Mom wouldn't stop crying, and to a young lad like myself, that was odd. The memory of that day was being a small boy with a very sad Mom. The loss we suffered that day was great. History would be very, very different if not for the loss of President Kennedy.

Time passes and the world moves on. A thought not lost on me today as we think about those lost to war and to a sniper's bullets 48 years ago today.

Enclosed is the post I made a year ago regarding Lt. Robert M. Kelly, USMC and the services for him at Arlington National Cemetery. He was a good man and a fine Marine, serving our country. We remember him and all others who gave the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our nation.

Semper Fi Lt. Kelly, we have the watch.

US Navy Jeep - 11/22/10

ALCON -

As I have witnessed, many of the readers of this blog hold the mission that our military undertakes as serious business. There can be no more serious business than putting men & women in the uniform of our country in harm's way. I deeply appreciate the support that each of us give to this mission.

Today, I was able to fulfill part of that mission by attending the funeral services for Lt. Robert M. Kelly, USMC today at the Fort Myer Chapel, located next to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC. I was able to do so because I work for an Airline since arriving back in Boston from Afghanistan, and they are the kind of company that not only allows you to get on a jet anytime you want to (or need to) but also encourages you to do so. I was encouraged to do this by my colleagues and it was approved by my supervisor. I thought about it and decided in a very short time, that it was the absolutely right thing to do, I can do it, and I should do it.

Monday Morning, Nov. 22nd, I got on a flight out of Boston and arrived at Reagan National Airport in just over an hour. Arlington National Cemetery is very close (2 1/2 miles) and I got a cab there. Of Course, the cabby didn't know about the location for the ceremony and he was able to bring me deep into the middle of Arlington National Cemetery. I got turned around for a minute and wound up back near the entrance. It gave me the opportunity to pay my respects to President Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy and their children who are buried there. The fact that this was November 22nd was not lost on me and seemed ironic that I would be travelling there to honor a Marine and still it happens to be November 22nd of all days. I also paid my respects at his brother's gravesites Senator Robert Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy. Each are buried close together near the front of the park.

Afterwards I had to find my way to the other side of the cemetery and was helped out by a park employee. I wound up on a brisk walk across Arlington National Cemetery, and emerged at the back gate which leads into Ft. Meyer. The Gate Guards pointed the way and the chapel was only 1000 yards across the base. I arrived slightly warm but no worse for the wear.

I was in line with hundreds of others, and spent part of my time speaking to young Marine Sgt. who was with friends who are also Marines, but were in civilian dress. The line was a who's-who of military with enough Two Star & Three Star Generals, Navy Captains, Marine Colonels and so many other officers that you could have filled an antique shop with all the brass. Many others there also including Policemen, Firemen and people from various groups to pay their respects. We were ushered in to the Chapel and directed to our seats by Marines as attendants. The Chapel is a bright and airy space, modern but at the same time, providing you with a sense of history.

The ceremony began with a presentation to Lt. Kelly's wife and family of the commendations awarded to him. A Purple Heart for wounds sustained in the battle he died in and a Navy/Marine Corps Commendation medal with Combat Distinguishing Device.authorized for valor (heroism) for a number of missions he accomplished including the one where he lost his life.

The services were very appropriate and the Navy Chaplain gave a great sermon about the meaning of how Christ died for us and he conquered death so that we would not need to be afraid. That Robert had simply gone on to eternal life with our Lord Jesus Christ and was waiting for friends & family when they got there. He ended his sermon with a traditional Irish Blessing (given in Gaelic) saying, " Farewell, God Bless you and see you when we meet again. "

The eulogies were given by his Brother, Capt. John Kelly, USMC and his father Lt. General John F. Kelly, USMC. His Brother went first and spoke about how his brother was a fine man, happy and as expected, the light of his families' life along with his bride, Heather. It was in the middle of his Brother's eulogy that I realized why I was drawn to be there on this day for this Marine.

Captain Kelly detailed about his Brother's career and spoke about the different assignments that Robert had held including Operation Iraqi Freedom, and specifically Operation Al Fajr in Fallujah in November 2004. It was at that moment that the Good Lord's desire to have me go became apparent to me. I was struck by the fact that not only had I been in Afghanistan with this splendid young Marine, but we had served together in Fallujah when I was there in 2004-2005. He & I were not personally acquainted, but we had served under the same Marine Command, and he was there providing security for me & my fellow Seabees. I found myself welling up and thanking the Lord for his will to push me to be there to honor this Marine as Robert was one of those who helped me while I was deployed.

His brother spoke about that the streets of our country and other countries around the world were guarded by United States Marines. He said that he was confident that the streets in Heaven were also guarded by United States Marines. He then stated, " And my Brother is one of those Marines, guarding the streets in heaven." Very touching and true, I am sure.

His father spoke next, saying first and foremost, that he was not there to eulogize his son. He stated "Anyone who is laid out for his final resting place dressed in the uniform of his country's finest, the United States Marines, and wrapped in his country's flag did not need eulogizing and his life's accomplishments are evident to all." Lt. General Kelly went on to describe that we as a country are at war with an enemy that will not go away and only wants our destruction and submission. He spoke eloquently regarding his opinion of the threat our nation faces and how that we as a country are protected by a small number of men & women who volunteer, give up their regular lives and go out to defend our nation against those who would do it harm. He said that many doubt our country but he said as long as our country produced men & women like those he spoke of, there was much hope that we would rid the world of the vile filth that wages terror against innocents.

His last statement was poignant as he described how as a Commander, he had to speak to many families and wounded Marines about the loss of their friends, sons, brothers, fathers and others. Each time, whether he wrote them a letter from overseas, or visited with them in person, he tried to imagine what they were going through and empathize with their loss.

He then stated, " I owe each and every one of them an apology as I could not imagine the depth of the pain they were going through as my wife and I have been going through it since we were notified of the loss of our son. It is unbearable. " His statement speaks volumes to a Father's love & pride for his son.

I was honored and privileged enough to be in attendance among many of our country's finest warriors, Robert's friends & family and felt that I had been called there by a force much greater than anything I can explain here with my paltry words. It was a moment I will not forget.

I had to leave at the end of the ceremonies as I had to catch the return flight to Boston and the services ended close to 2:10 with my return flight at just after 3:00. I was able to walk back across Arlington National Cemetery to the main entrance where they have cabs standing by. I imagined that somewhere in heaven, there was a Marine Lt. laughing as he watched this old Seabee hump his way back across the cemetery to the cab stand. I hope it provided all of them up there in heaven a good laugh. I regret that I was unable to attend the graveside ceremonies, but being there for his services was extraordinary. The time schedule only allowed me time to be there for the service in the chapel.

I caught a cab to the airport, checked in for the flight and was able to be back in my office in Boston by 17:00, no worse for the wear & tear but feeling that I had fulfilled and important mission Monday. Honoring one of our Country's finest, a warrior, son, brother, friend, husband and defender of our Flag.

There could be no finer mission than the one he fulfilled and I wanted to make sure I did not fail in my mission to honor him as we had shared many of the same places and experiences. He as a United States Marine and me, as a US Navy Seabee in Iraq and a contractor supporting the Marines at Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan. He & I share a bond that was not apparent until his passing but carried no less importance after his death than it did in life. We were brothers-in-arms and that was all that mattered.

Fair Winds & following seas, shipmate. Rest easy Marine, we have the watch.

On a wing & a prayer - U.S. Army "Dustoff" Medevac Crews risk it all to save their battle buddies

US ARMY DUSTOFF MEDEVAC Flight saves a wounded Marine in Sangin....The pictures show Lance Cpl. Blas Trevino from 1st Battalion, 5th Marines whose ordeal is detailed below.

These men & women are the heroes who fly into a hail of bullets, risking all to save a wounded battle buddy in Afghanistan's most dangerous places. No words can praise them well enough.

Bravo Zulu !!

Lucky Charms and Bullet Holes -- Flying Medevac
June 17, 2011
Associated Press by Anja Niedringhaus

"We got another mission," the message from U.S. Army medic Sgt. Josef Campbell read.

I jotted back: "Where?"

"Sangin, hot landing zone, Marines under fire, one is injured."

Southern Afghanistan remains a stronghold of the Taliban, and Sangin is a hotly contested district. The spring fighting season is now under way. That means more soldiers wounded by gunfire and bombings. And more work for the medics of the "Dustoff" helicopters.

As we approached Sangin, I saw an Afghan woman hanging her laundry inside the yard of her house. The tranquility of the scene helped me relax.

That sense of calm lasted just a few moments.

Dust, mud and grass churned up in front of us as the Black Hawk landed.

Campbell, 35, of Juniper, Idaho, reached out to open the door. Then gunfire erupted.

I heard a metallic sound and realized the helicopter had been hit. The pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Fink, quickly pulled the helicopter's nose toward the sky. All I could see in front of us were trees and power lines.

"If we are going to crash. I don't want to see it," I thought. My eyes shut, I held onto my seat belt.

I opened my eyes. We hadn't crashed. Slowly, the helicopter gained altitude and rose to safety.

We cruised slowly as Fink, 40, of Spring Hills, Kansas, and another pilot, Chief Warrant Office 2 Niel Steward, 34, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, checked the helicopter to make sure it could still maneuver. It could.

Only one thing rushed through my mind: "Please, please, just let us get out of here until that firefight down on the ground ends." But of course I didn't say that out loud.

After 15 minutes, I realized we would return to the same spot. As I looked at Campbell, I noticed his extraordinary level of concentration. He adjusted his gloves, reached for his assault rifle and then peered out of his open window.

I kept trying to find my lucky charms in my pockets.

The helicopter touched down right where we took fire only minutes earlier. The big side door slid open. I reached for my camera, feeling better because I could concentrate on something else.

Campbell jumped out first. He looked around. Neither of us could see the Marines. Suddenly, a Marine jumped up from a ditch nearby, one hand on his stomach and the other holding rosary beads.

The Marine sprinted toward us, turning around to wave to the others that he could make it to the helicopter. Another Marine tried to catch up to help him, but the injured Marine, Lance Cpl. Blas Trevino from 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, ran so fast he made it to the helicopter first.

Trevino latched onto Campbell in a desperate hug.

"You have made it! You have made it!" Campbell shouted over the whine of the idling helicopter.

Trevino collapsed on a stretcher, exhausted. He lifted his head to scream: "Yes, I have made it!"

As the helicopter lifted off again, the medics began treating Trevino for a gunshot wound to his stomach. During the 10-minute flight, Trevino kept praying while clutching his rosary beads. He gave us thumbs-up signal. He would survive the wound.

We landed at Forward Operating Base Edi outside Sangin but still in Helmand province. Medics carried Trevino into a hospital tent.

Meanwhile, Fink and Stewart walked around the helicopter, looking for damage.

Gunfire had struck five times in the tail. One bullet passed barely a third of an inch (1 centimeter) from the hydraulic system powering the huge helicopter. Another went through the metal near the fuel tank.

The two men took off their bulletproof vests.

"That was pretty close," they agreed.

Nineteen soldiers make up the U.S. Army "Dustoff" unit. The unit, based out of Landstuhl, Germany, operates from a gravel runway in Helmand province. The soldiers use plastic bags for toilets.

Most of their supplies, like food and water bottles, is dropped by parachute every other day from a plane. Marines run out of the camp to collect them, taking care not to step on land mines.

After a year in Afghanistan, members of the unit will head home with their memories. Spc. Jenny Martinez's voice grew soft as she recounted treating a Marine who stepped on an explosive and lost both of his legs.

She held his hand all the way to the field hospital.

"He didn't want to let me go," said Martinez, 24, of Colorado Springs, Colorado. But "I had to leave because we had another mission

The USMC in SANGIN - “We’ve done what we came out here to do."

The overview of what was accomplished by the USMC in Sangin, the "FALLUJAH" of Afghanistan, cannot be understated.

The name of SANGIN will be held in the same reverence that you hear when Veterans speak of Fallujah, Ramadi, Chosin, Khe Sahn and a number of other key locations around the Globe where the US Marines proved to all that they are the real deal.....

SEMPER FI...the price paid was dear.


Marines turn the tide in the ‘Fallujah of Afghanistan’
By Gretel C. Kovach - San Diego Tribune
Saturday, April 23, 2011

SANGIN, Afghanistan — It would be hard to forget that face, even if they hadn’t seen it just the day before.

A young Afghan man stood on the side of a narrow dirt lane, watching an open-top truckload of Marines head into a volatile neighborhood in this river valley town coveted by Taliban insurgents and drug lords.

The man smiled at the Marines and waved. Then he yanked a kite string detonation cord attached to a bomb buried in the road.

A platoon from Camp Pendleton’s 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment would have been decimated in the attack. The battalion already had suffered more casualties than any other in the 10-year war in Afghanistan, long before its seven-month tour ended this month. But the homemade device was a dud. It smoked but failed to explode until the Marines drove safely out of the way.

The next day, the Marines shot their way back into the ravine, wounding an armed fighter who was dragged into a mosque. When they reached the alley where they had been attacked, Cpl. Jason Gaal and Staff Sgt. Nathan Stocking couldn’t believe their eyes. Both recognized a guy riding by on a motorcycle.

“Lo’ and behold, there’s our trigger man,” Gaal said.

Stocking walked the trembling flex-cuffed detainee back to base, overcompensating for his fury with exaggerated gentleness. “My buddy … my buddy,” he sang, guiding his prisoner lightly by the arm.

The arrest in March of the suspected insurgent was one of many hard-fought victories the 3/5 Marines were savoring during their last weeks in Sangin. Even by Marine Corps standards and the long history of one of its most decorated battalions, their tour that ended this month was brutal.

In October, the Camp Pendleton unit was dropped into the deadliest area of the country for international troops. Their ensuing battle for Sangin extracted a grim toll from their ranks — nearly one in four wounded or killed, most in the first three months. At least 29 Marines and sailors from the battalion and its attachments died and a couple hundred more were wounded.

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates flew to Sangin last month, he said he had been praying for the 3/5 Marines daily, because they had paid an extraordinary price in sweat and blood to add their names to the Marine Corps roll of honor. But the result had been a “dramatic turnaround,” in his view, for an area of the country that had bedeviled and bloodied British troops and the Afghan government for years.

“You’ve killed, captured or driven away most of the Taliban that called this place home. And in doing so, you’ve linked northern Helmand, Uruzgan and Kandahar provinces, a major strategic breakthrough,” Gates told the Marines.

Going in

They had prepared for a tough fight. Anyone who Googled “Sangin,” as many of the Marines heading there did, knew that subduing the “Fallujah of Afghanistan” would be a challenge. Before the British pulled out in September, they lost more than 100 troops in Sangin, nearly a third of their war dead.

The town of mud-walled homes and concrete block bazaar stalls in the far northeast of Helmand province is flanked by jagged peaks and a patchwork of poppy fields. Its stunning beauty, remoteness and access to a strategic crossroads made it a nexus for Taliban militants.

The British had shouldered much of the security burden in Helmand province since 2006. Troop levels forced them to focus on more populated areas while they struggled in Sangin to secure the main road, the district government offices and their military bases.

With British troops penned in under constant attack, the insurgents had free rein to run weapons, fighters and drugs. The Kabul administration seemed to write off Sangin as a lost cause. Helmand governor Gulab Mangal raged at the British, “stop calling it the Sangin District and start calling it the Sangin Base. All you have done here is built a military camp next to the city,” according to U.S. diplomatic cables first publicized by the WikiLeaks website.

A ferocious fight

When the 3/5 Marines arrived, they literally stepped into a minefield.

They were warned by another unit that took command for a few weeks after the British departed, the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines from Twentynine Palms, that the density of homemade bombs dug into the dirt roads, paths, and bullet-pocked housing compounds of the Sangin valley was unlike anything international forces had encountered in Afghanistan or Iraq.


The new battalion started the tour losing 10 Marines killed and many more wounded within nine days, most of them to improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

Kilo Company’s introduction to Sangin began Oct. 14, when a patrol was attacked by streams of enemy machine gun fire. Amid the firefight, one Marine stepped on a homemade bomb. A minute later, a second Marine triggered another.

A Navy hospital corpsman, knowing he was surrounded by buried explosives, ran to help. He lost both his legs. Lance Cpl. Alec Catherwood and Lance Cpl. Joseph Lopez died, a squad leader was shot in the leg and incapacitated, and several other Marines suffered concussions.

With so many wounded and killed and stunned, a 26-year-old scout sniper leader operating in the distance, Sgt. Matthew Abbate, ignored the bomb threat and maneuvered in to take control. (In December, he too was killed, and the battalion nominated him for one of the Navy’s highest medals for valor in combat.)

That evening, with two platoons running low on ammunition, the company commander and his enlisted leaders walked into Patrol Base Fires to resupply the Marines. Insurgents had flooded the area to cut off the base. The only way in was a trek through mud.

“Fires was totally surrounded,” Capt. Nickoli Johnson recalled.

During the Korean War, the 3/5 Marines had been encircled by divisions of Chinese troops in the Chosin reservoir, Johnson reminded them, but the “Darkhorse” battalion broke out under extremely dire circumstances and fought its way to the sea.

“This is your opportunity to lead a breakout of your own. We’re going to go out there, we’re going to penetrate those defenses and we’re going to chase the enemy down. We’re going to punish them where they sleep and follow them wherever they go, until we break their backs,” he said.

In October, international air forces dropped more weapons on Afghanistan than in any other month since at least 2007. Most of the Hellfire missiles, 500-pound bombs and Excalibur artillery rounds, among other ordnance, supported the Marines in Sangin, where the ferocious fight continued for months.

At first the insurgents organized complex ambushes and fought toe to toe with the Marines from elaborate defenses, including perches in trees and firing ports gouged into mud walls. Later they relied increasingly on indirect attacks, including homemade bombs, assassinations and beatings to intimidate “collaborators.”

On several occasions, Marine positions were close to being overrun. At a patrol base protecting a power station, the small unit first assigned there made a warning system out of a string of soup cans. Insurgents threw death threats for their translator over the patrol base wall at night tied to corn stalks.

The mass casualties continued, but the Marines kept pushing out of their patrol bases, deep into Taliban territory.

The toll

Lt. Will Donnelly, a popular 27-year-old platoon commander known for his willingness to drive inebriated Marines home at all hours of the night, had finally convinced his longtime girlfriend to start a family. They married in the forest of Yosemite Park two weeks before he deployed. He was shot to death on Thanksgiving Day, and his men fought back to base with his body, firing rifles and throwing grenades.

Lance Cpl. Brandon Pearson, 21, and Lance Cpl. Matthew Broehm, 22, were murdered by a turncoat Afghan soldier who gunned them down on their patrol base while they were standing post. The Afghan man drank tea and watched music videos with the Marines before the attack as if nothing was amiss. He fled that night under cover of insurgent gunfire. When the Marines later realized it had been an inside job, their blood curdled in loathing and mistrust.

Lt. Robert Kelly, another popular platoon commander who made a point of leading from the front, was killed by an insurgent bomb buried in the bank of a canal. Many of the men he served with had no idea that the 29-year-old officer, who had previously served in the enlisted ranks, was the son of a three-star Marine Corps general.

Lance Cpl. Brandon Long, whose legs were blown off, among other grave injuries, felt that he died during the bomb strike. “I was walking to the light and I heard a voice tell me it’s not your time,’” he wrote in a letter to his rifle company.

“Which way do I go?” he asked.

“The way that you came,” the voice responded. Two days later his daughter was born. Wanting to be a father to her brought him back to life, he said.

Gaal, 22, who was promoted to squad leader in January after another Marine he admired died, said “there is really no way to prepare yourself for the first time that you see somebody’s legs get blown off, or you see one of your friends get killed.

“It sucks, but the situation that we’re in, you don’t have a lot of time to sit there and think about it. You just have to keep pressing on,” he said.

As waves of combat replacements deployed to Sangin, many seriously injured Marines hid their wounds to avoid being sent home. At least two who were shot and ordered back to Camp Pendleton to recover returned months later to Sangin to finish the tour.

At a memorial service in January for three of his Marines killed in action, Lt. Col. Jason Morris, the 3/5 Battalion commander, asked: “Where do we get men such as these, men who look death in the face and continue to move forward?”

The losses were painful, but they steeled the resolve of the Marines to punish the enemy, Johnson said. “It was like throwing gasoline on a fire that was already burning.”

During a shura meeting in January, an Afghan man approached the regimental commander in charge of northern Helmand at the time, Col. Paul Kennedy, and smashed him in the face with a rock, breaking his nose. A Marine in his security detail shot the Afghan dead.

That month, a squad reinforced with snipers and machine gunners battled the Taliban in a six-hour firefight, killing at least two dozen of them. The Marines were running low on ammunition for the second time that day, night was falling and they had chased the insurgents into another unit’s area of operations before the company commander ordered them back.

The Taliban had built a mystique of being magical warriors who appeared and disappeared like ghosts. But Sgt. Philip McCulloch, Jr., the 22-year-old squad leader, said: “There were motorcycles and dead Taliban all over the battlefield. It was something you don’t see every day out here.”

Breakthroughs

The closure of about half the British bases, including checkpoints lining the main route through town, had handed terrain secured at great cost back to the insurgents.

The decision was based on manpower and a more flexible patrolling strategy. By the time the Camp Pendleton 3/5 Marines arrived, the main road was full of bombs. To resupply its northern Sangin bases, the 20-minute drive required an all-day detour through the desert, where each convoy invariably hit a bomb.

In December, the Marines secured Route 611 during a two-week operation to clear the explosives. The operation was possible in part because of a mini surge of troops and other resources sent to the greater Sangin valley that helped the Marines fortify their positions and build new ones.

A company of Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment that had been operating in Marjah took over one corner of the battalion’s area of operations, while reconnaissance Marines moved into another. Reservists from the 3/25 Battalion pitched in standing post and other duties in Sangin, and a company of tankers plus a battalion landing team of about 1,000 Marines reinforced their southern flank in Gereshk.

The influx was coupled with the infusion of extra Afghan paramilitary police forces early this year and the appointment of about a dozen district government officials, as a logjam of Afghan resources that had been particularly felt in Sangin began to break free across Helmand province, British and American civilian representatives said.

The added manpower and reopening of the road were among the factors that reached a tipping point in Sangin over the winter, resulting in a steep plunge in violence and newfound cooperation by formerly recalcitrant tribal elders. Another factor was the changing of the seasons, when head-high corn was harvested and leaves fell from the trees, depriving the enemy of cover, and cold rains degraded explosives.

The Marines assigned to the most heavily bomb-laden central areas had also learned the hard way early on that no technology was infallible and even the ground they stood on was not safe. Engineers assigned to sweep ahead of the patrols couldn’t always count on their metal detectors to find the bombs, so they shuffled their feet with small steps. “I make sure that I’ll be the one to step on it before any of these guys,” said 19-year-old Lance Cpl. Zachary Stangle.

The bomb threat is a numbers game in the insurgents’ favor, because the Marines may find 99 explosives, but it takes just one to kill. “Fortunately we are a learning organization, and the Marines obviously want to keep their legs. They want to stay alive. So they got very good at finding them,” said Morris, the 3/5 battalion commander.

By March the battalion had encountered more than 1,000 bombs in their area of central Sangin district. Only 145 of them were strikes. The rest were found or interdicted before they could harm. By comparison, the battalion was engaged in more than 520 firefights and killed or wounded about 470 enemy fighters in that time.

Bing West, a military historian who made several trips to Helmand province in the last year, said that the innate aggression of the U.S. Marine made the difference on the battlefield. “The Marines have won. No one wants to fight them anymore,” he said.

When Brig. Gen. Joseph Osterman, the Task Force Leatherneck commander, sent his theatre reserve of about 400 reconnaissance Marines into the far north of Sangin in late November, fighters swarmed to the area. The recon Marines killed hundreds within about five weeks, he said. “The insurgents attacked them in that position and basically just impaled themselves on the Marines.” The intense combat helped push the largest tribe in Sangin to a cease-fire, which was clinched in January after Afghan provincial officials showed the Alikozai around the bustling and relatively peaceful provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.

The tribe broke with the Taliban in 2007, but insurgents crushed the Alikozai uprising, dragging one elder out of town behind a truck. Afghan and British forces stood by, unable or unwilling to intervene.

The latest security agreement did not live up to its promise, since attacks continued in Alikozai areas. But a steep drop in enemy activity allowed Marine engineers to finish grading and graveling Route 611 in March up to the Kajaki district border, Marine commanders said.

Rebuilding the road was central to the Marine strategy of “big stick COIN,” in Sangin — counterinsurgency operations that rely on both the carrot of development and the stick of combat power, said Lt. Col. Thomas West, a civil affairs Marine from Anaheim Hills.

“Securing that 611 route and taking it away from the Taliban is opening a huge avenue of stability,” said West, who was part of a companion surge of governance and development experts sent to Sangin. “It makes a vital economic corridor that the people here depend on.”

Capt. Abdul Hamid, 29, an Afghan army commander who has been stationed in Sangin for a year and a half, said that enemy flags and bombs used to surround the international coalition’s patrol bases. “Now, with the Marines’ help, some of the Taliban have turned in their weapons, and the people feel free to come and tell us about the IEDs. Now they know the government is dominant here.”

What’s next

The true test of whether the security gains the 3/5 Marines wrought in Sangin can be sustained will come this summer, after the poppy is harvested and the traditional fighting season is in full swing. Before their replacements took over in April — the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, also from Camp Pendleton — small groups of fighters had begun to infiltrate Sangin, causing an uptick in harassing shooting attacks.

Many Sangin residents say they are weary of war. Toward the end of their tour, so were many Marines. The glamour had worn off for many gung-ho infantrymen stationed in Sangin, who declared the boring patrols to be the best.

“We’ve done what we came out here to do. This place is a lot more stable now,” said Sgt. Ivan Teran, 24. “You’re not going to hear any of these guys saying ‘yeah, let’s get some!’ … They’ve experienced just about as much as you can experience being a grunt in the Marine Corps.”

The Darkhorse Marines fought on after seeing their best friends ripped limb from limb, over and over again — five times in the case of one lance corporal this reporter spoke to. The courage of this generation of Marines in the face of such an insidious weapon, “a weapon designed to maim, a weapon designed to have psychological impact by inflicting grotesque casualties,” made a deep impression on Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, the senior Marine and NATO commander of southwestern Afghanistan for the last year.

“I’m just awed by their ability every day to disregard the danger and face the enemy,” knowing what each step could cost them, Mills said.

Back in San Diego, medical staff assembled a multipart plan to help the Marines and their families with the transition home.

Sangin changed them, the Marines conceded. They wouldn’t be human otherwise. But Stocking, the 27-year-old platoon sergeant serving his fourth combat tour, said he was not worried about their mental state. “Once everyone gets home they’re going to realize that the sky is so much bluer, the air breathes so much better,” he said.

“Guys that have been in this type of situation … they realize how good life really is.”


© Copyright 2011 The San Diego Union-Tribune LLC.

The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment leaves Afghanistan - Unit suffered more KIA / WIA than any other USMC unit in Afghan War taking on Sangin

( I apologize for the formatting of this post - For some reason, the webpage has not been holding the normal paragraphing - This was an important story to share...)


SEMPER FI to the 3/5 and our condolences for the losses suffered, prayers for all who suffered the loss of family & friends along with hopes of speedy recovery for those wounded defending the citizens of Afghanistan from the Taliban.

Best Wishes to the 1/23 in taking on a tough mission. You have the thanks of a grateful nation and this Seabee who shared time at Camp Leatherneck with these brave men & women.

I do not consider myself as a Hero, but I have been in the company of Heroes in Afghanistan and Iraq....the 3/5 are American Heroes and I was grateful to have shared time with them in both locations.
Marine unit that suffered most casualties coming home Camp Pendleton Unit scaling back role in Afghanistan
By MARK WALKER - mlwalker@nctimes.com
North County Times The Californian Thursday, March 24, 2011 The Camp Pendleton unit that has seen more troops killed and wounded in action than any other Marine Corps unit in the 10-year-old Afghan war is coming home. The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment will return in a couple of weeks ahead of a wave of other units from the base's I Marine Expeditionary Force.
The lead role in Afghanistan is being taken over by the II Marine Expeditionary Force based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
A transfer of command ceremony is set for Saturday at Camp Leatherneck, the main Marine base in the southern Helmand province where most Marines are assigned. At that ceremony, Camp Pendleton Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, who has overseen the fighting by the 20,000 Marines in Afghanistan for the last year, will relinquish that command and return home.
The number of locally based troops at war in the south-central Asian nation will fall from slightly more than 10,000 to about 7,000 by the end of spring and down to about 2,000 by midsummer, said 2nd Lt. Joanna Cappeto, a Camp Pendleton spokeswoman.
Among the most anticipated homecomings is the return of the battered 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, whose nickname is the "Dark Horse Battalion." The approximately 950-member infantry unit was engaged in heavy fighting in the Sangin District of the Helmand province from the time it arrived there at the end of the summer until recent weeks.
The region was rife with Taliban insurgents, who used the district as a haven for illicit drug trafficking and manufacturing roadside bombs. In its aggressive pursuit of the insurgents, the battalion saw 25 of its members killed in action, most of them from the bombs that are the weapon responsible for most U.S. and NATO troop casualties.
More than 150 battalion troops were wounded, including more than a dozen who had single- or multiple-limb amputations. One of the men wounded in that fashion was Oceanside resident Lt. Cameron West, a platoon leader who lost a leg and suffered other injuries in an Oct. 15 blast while leading a patrol less than three weeks after arriving in Afghanistan. West, who continues to undergo therapy at Naval Medical Center San Diego, said Tuesday that he's eager to see the battalion get back to Camp Pendleton. "I've been waiting for the last six months," West said. "These are my guys and I can't wait to see them."

When the battalion gets back, commanders have ordered that it be kept as intact as possible for three months to allow its troops to decompress from the rigors of war and violence they experienced. "We won't transfer anybody until at least 90 days after they come," said Col. Willy Buhl, regimental commander. "We are keeping people together during that critical decompression time to enable getting them the education and the observation and natural decompression that occurs when you are with your buddies. They are the only ones who can truly understand what they've been through."
The battalion also will be closely monitored by mental health specialists under the direction of Rear Adm. C. Forrest Faison III, commander of Navy Medicine West and Naval Medical Center San Diego. The specialists will work with the troops and their families as a part of an effort to stave off post-traumatic stress disorder and destructive behaviors. "We're trying to see how we can take (post-combat care) to the next level of assistance after 10 years of war," was how Buhl termed the effort during a recent conversation at Camp Pendleton.
Bill Rider, president of the Oceanside-based American Combat Veterans of War that counsels troops in distress, said the post-deployment care is a wise move. "Maintaining unit cohesion after war is good for the troops because it will allow them to talk to their brother warriors and work things out," he said. "It's not a panacea that will fix everything, but it's a good start." Rider said the battalion will need to confront the carnage it suffered. "They are going to have to work out in their own minds all that happened and all the little hobgoblins that come along, such as 'Why did I survive when all the others didn't?'" he said.
The 25 battalion deaths are among 61 combat fatalities for Camp Pendleton troops since March 1, 2010, according to records kept by the North County Times based on Department of Defense casualty releases. As the 3/5 battalion comes home, troops from Camp Pendleton's 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment have been deploying to Afghanistan, where a traditional lull in fighting during the winter months is ending. Other major Camp Pendleton units heading out include Combat Logistics Battalion 7 and the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment

The "why?" behind our conflict in Afghanistan....The real reason why we are there...

Like many who have been in Afghanistan, I have been asked by people back home, " WHY ?"

WHY are we spending all our blood & treasure there??? WHY are we still there after 10 years ? WHY ? WHY ? WHY ?

Here is the " WHY "....This is why the Marines of the 3/5 were glad to win the battles in Sangin. They were doing it for others, not themselves.

I was able to witness this same progress in person while I was there and I am glad to share the words of a female reporter from the Sandy Eggo Trib.....She brings the reason " why ?" into the clearest focus.....now, you know "why "

Afghanistan war diary: the girls of Sangin
By Gretel C. Kovach
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 5:27 p.m.

SANGIN, Afghanistan — Many Marines stationed in Sangin have a soft spot for the little girls who scamper after them on patrol. Knowing there is no chance that these bright-eyed little lasses will join the insurgency after they are grown and shoot at them is one reason, but the young Afghan girls are also simply adorable.

Despite the decline in power of the Taliban, female teenagers and women are still rarely seen in public in southern Afghanistan outside the provincial capital -- not even in the peacock blue burqas the Kabulis wear or the dark shroud more common to this area that lacks an eye-slit or grille. But young girls dressed in bright red or green shifts trimmed in sparkling thread play alongside their brothers in streets and fields, or tote babies with kohl-streaked eyes on their narrow hips. (The eyeliner is thought to improve the infants’ eyesight.) If the Marines don’t stop giving these girls so much candy, there will not be a woman left in Helmand province in 20 years who has any teeth.

Under the Taliban’s fanatical interpretation of Islam, girls were not allowed to attend school, or boys for that matter unless it was one of the militants’ cultish madrasas. Women couldn’t work outside the home, and their access to quality medical care was limited since there were no women doctors. Ten years into the U.S. war against al-Qaeda and their onetime hosts in Afghanistan, the Taliban fighters that had reemerged like a poisonous weed are being rooted out from the heartland of their movement once again. But some of the old ways based in patriarchal tribal culture remain. Social mores still force girls indoors at adolescence, where they have few opportunities in life other than to marry and raise their children hidden behind high mud walls. Knowing what sort of claustrophobic existence awaits her in a few years makes the sight of a little girl running freely in the open air all the more joyous.

The Marines say they are not trying to impose American culture on Afghanistan (which is why the U.S. military builds mosques here, since almost everyone is Muslim and quite pious.) But the expansion of women’s rights and opportunities seems to be a fortunate side-effect of the war, and one that is fully in-line with mainstream Islamic beliefs. The Prophet Mohammed was married to a businesswoman afterall. Now some fathers in this ultra-conservative Pashtun region are sending their young girls to school in the classrooms popping up in tents and new buildings throughout the region. Disparities are still pronounced, even when it comes to the education of very young female students. During our visit to a new school the Marines established in Marjah, we saw several hundred male students but only about 40 girls. But the FETs, the Female Engagement Team of women Marines, recruited each of those girls one by one, including the first they literally pulled off the street. So it was a good start, if a modest one.

During our last visit to Afghanistan in August and September, photographer Nelvin Cepeda and I spent some time in the Laki area of Garmser district, a hinterlands community of farmers and shepherds. We listened to infantry Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment stationed there at the time as they tried to convince local tribal elders to allow their daughters to attend school. The negotiations were delicate, and the education of all Laki children, girls and boys, hung in the balance as the Marines solicited the local power brokers for help organizing new schools. But the Marines succeeded in the end, because there is a girl’s school today in Laki.

It is easy for the Marines to push too far and too fast and alienate the Afghan people they are trying to win over, and they have on occasion. For instance, the FET Marines in Sangin have been quite successful in gaining access to the other half of the population in one of Afghanistan’s most violent areas. Some Afghan women have adopted them as second daughters of sorts or pointed out hidden bombs. But one of their biggest disappointments involved the only female doctor in Sangin, not counting the midwives. Hundreds of Afghans had started showing up to the FET’s health initiatives in Sangin, when they teach parents about basic hygiene and health care, such as the need to hydrate children suffering from diarrhea instead of the local custom of depriving them of liquids. But when they urged the sole female doctor practicing in Sangin to attend their next health outreach, the woman removed the sign outside her office and skipped town.

A recent women’s shura meeting was also something of a bust because of low attendance, Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, the senior Marine in command of NATO troops in southwestern Afghanistan, told me. In time, even the most remote and battle-scarred corners of Helmand province will nurture women leaders. For now, in an area of the country where roughly 10 percent of the men can read and write and perhaps one percent of the women, according to the Marines’ estimates, a sixth-grade education is a major accomplishment for a girl.

As a woman journalist who works with Marines in combat, I find a bit of delicious irony in the fact that infantry grunts -- that macho testosterone-fueled bunch of trained killers -- are on the front lines of this campaign to teach the daughters of Afghanistan to read. Many of these young riflemen are fathers as well as fighters. When their own daughters learn of what they’ve done, I think they will be proud.

gretel.kovach@uniontrib.com

"No battalion in the Marine Corps... in WW II, Korea, Vietnam (has) pulled a tougher mission than what 3/5 has right now in AFGHN " Gen. Richard Mills

In Nebraska, a US Marine's Father shares the letters he gets from his son who is with the USMC 3/5 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment in Sangin, Afghanistan... The Dad is a Marine himself and knows of the sacrifice his son and the others out there are making.....

Please share this with others as people need to know what their Marines are up against in Sangin, just northeast of Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province.


Marine's dad reads between lines
By Matthew Hansen
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Published Sunday March 6, 2011

WEST POINT, Neb. — Rick Wimer pulls the tattered, dirty-white envelope out of the mailbox on a frigid winter Friday.

His hands start to shake. It isn't the cold.

Wimer is an old Marine, a volunteer EMT in West Point, a man who has seen things.

But the return address on this letter says Afghanistan, and the handwriting on the front is Cpl. Ross Wimer's, and even an old Marine gets jittery when his second-born son sends his first letter home from the Sangin district of Helmand province — maybe the most dangerous speck of land in the entire Afghan war.

Rick pries open the envelope, careful not to rip it. He shakes out the four-page letter and speed-reads the first paragraph, standing next to his mailbox on Centennial Road.

The words suck the air out of his lungs.

“So I thought I would start the letter writing thing today,” Marine Cpl. Ross Wimer writes. “It is a sad day for 1st Platoon as we have lost a good friend once again. ... He was shot in the head by a sniper. His wife has just given birth to a child. I am not sure if it was a boy or a girl.”

There are many places in Afghanistan where the young men and women of the U.S. military live on bases with running water and Internet access and can assure their loved ones that they sleep safely at night.

Sangin, Afghanistan, is not one of those places.

***
Cpl. Ross Wimer reached the outskirts of the southern Afghan town in October, one of about 1,000 Marines in the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment taking over a security mission long held by the British.

Since then he has lived for long stretches in a tiny outpost with sandbags for walls and a tarp for a roof.

He cannot e-mail because there are no computers, or Internet connections, or reliable electricity.

He can call home on a satellite phone once or twice a month, and the calls frequently get cut off.

Back in West Point, when Rick and Jayne Wimer's son calls, they have learned to tell him right away that they love him, before the line goes dead.

The young Marine hasn't showered since October.

He lives in the dirt and sleeps under the stars and never gets more than two steps from his M-32, a grenade launcher that weighs 15 pounds and can fire off six 40 mm shells in three seconds.

The enemy has shot at 1st Platoon practically every day since the 22-year-old from West Point showed up in Sangin. And the gunfire isn't the scary part.

The scary part are the homemade bombs, the IEDs that the Taliban plant on the roads and on the paths, in the fields and in the canals. The Marines have found nearly 500 IEDs buried around Sangin.

When they go on a mission, they walk “ranger style” — each man trying to walk in the footsteps of the man in front of him, worried that a stray step could be his last.

It is hard to describe in a letter what this feels like, but Ross Wimer tries. His dad is an old Marine. His dad will understand.

***
Rick Wimer carries the letter into his living room so he can get in out of the January cold and concentrate.

He rereads the first paragraph. He reads the whole first page. He does something he never does.

He begins to cry.

“He was a good friend. ... I will be sure not to dwell. His fate has been determined and I know thinking about it will be bad for my mental health in a combat zone. I have no choice but to brush it off and stay positive. Negative emotions can be a poison in the Platoon.

“On days like these too many Marines feel as if they are waiting in line for their turn.”

Rick Wimer wipes his eyes and flips to the second page of the letter, which is dated Dec. 6. His son has made a list of names, ranks and dates.

The first is a corporal. He stepped on an IED on Oct. 15 — the week the Marines reached Sangin.

“Lost his left leg and is fighting to keep his right.”

The second is a sergeant who stepped on an IED on Oct. 16.

“KIA.”

The list goes on, recounting IED blasts that cost one Marine his arm and another Marine both his legs and another his left leg and left eye.

The platoon commander — the son of a three-star general — took a step into the shallow water of a canal Nov. 9.

“KIA — stepped on an IED.”

Rick Wimer already knows about most of these casualties — generals and experts have written about the inordinate sacrifice borne by the Marine regiment in Sangin. Sometimes he sits in his insurance office and reads their words in military journals and magazines.

These articles say the Marines are going after the insurgents, day after day after day, in a way the British never did. They say the insurgents are desperately fighting back with everything they have, afraid to lose Sangin, their last foothold in Helmand province, and afraid to lose a main road the Taliban have long used to transport weapons and drugs.

The writers hint that the 1,000 men in the regiment are battling their way right into U.S. Marine history.

The regiment has patrolled Sangin for nearly five months. Twenty-five Marines have died. More than 150 have been wounded; many of the wounded have lost limbs.

“I don't think there's ever been a battalion in the Marine Corps at any time — in World War II, the Korean conflict, Vietnam — that's pulled a tougher mission than what 3/5 has right now,” Gen. Richard Mills, commander of U.S. and international forces in southwestern Afghanistan, told reporters in November.

Rick Wimer knows all this, but still he rereads his son's page-long list slowly. These are not just names and dates, a chronology of death in Sangin. These are his son's friends.

The lance corporal started with 33 men in his platoon.

“So with the (latest) death ... that brings our Platoon's total to 12 in just 2 months. 3 KIA. 9 WIA.”

***

Rick Wimer finishes the list, still standing in his living room, still unwilling to take the time to sit down.

He flips to the third page, then the fourth.

For the first time, he smiles.

The latter half of the letter focuses on care packages, an issue near and dear to this father's heart.

Truth is, Rick Wimer considers himself pretty much the best care-package sender in Nebraska, and quite possibly the world.

He sent his first care package in September, before his son had even reached Sangin.

He sent 16 boxes of stuff in one day early on — all 16 boxes on a day the platoon was moving to another outpost.

He has sent peaches, pears and dill pickles. He has sent eyedrops, cough drops and cold medicine.

He has sent shoelaces. He has sent mousetraps. He has sent old copies of The World-Herald so his son can keep track of the news back home.

He found a slingshot in a drawer at home. That went into a box bound for Afghanistan. He found a telescoping mirror. That went into a box, too.

“I don't know what the heck he's going to use that for,” he admits.

He has kept track of every care package, recording the contents and the weight in a notebook.

So far he has sent 134 boxes and 27 bubble envelopes. The packages have weighed a total of 2,239.87 pounds.

He plans to keep sending stuff until someone tells him to stop.

So that's why he is smiling — his son writes that he doesn't want the packages to stop.

He writes that he likes the seasonings that spice up his MREs, those bland, ready-to-eat military meals. He wants more magazines, and he'd love a cheap battery-powered razor.

He's good on blankets and notepads and pens. Sometimes he gives those to the Afghan kids in Sangin, and they crowd around him and happily accept the items that his father has carefully packed.

“My squad leader called dad a care package genius so you guys are doing good.”

***

Rick Wimer is reaching the letter's end now, and his thoughts drift to his son's homecoming, as they do almost every day.

He and another West Point man whose son is a Marine in Sangin go to lunch at JD's Bar and Grill sometimes and try to guess what day their sons will reach their base back in California.

It won't be before Easter on April 24, Rick Wimer thinks one minute. But maybe they will get lucky. Maybe it will be early April.

He worries how his son will readjust to Nebraska life, how he will handle going from the battlefields of Sangin to a college classroom this fall.

But the end of the letter makes him worry less: The young Marine has included a couple of jokes, retaining that sense of humor his father thinks will be invaluable when he comes home.

“How much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck would Chuck Norris? Answer: All of it.”


In West Point, on a cold winter Friday, Rick Wimer finishes the letter, refolds it and carefully places it back into its tattered envelope.

Soon he will take it to the office, copy and scan it, share it with co-workers and friends and relatives.

And soon this letter, forwarded and forwarded again, will force those who read it to feel the fury and the bravery and the tragedy of Sangin, Afghanistan.

But Rick Wimer isn't thinking about any of that, not yet.

He's savoring the letter's final line, the words that make an old Marine proud.

“That's it! Semper fi. Love ya'll.”


Contact the writer:

402-444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

With the Warriors: How our Marines go about the business of destroying the Taliban by Bing West

The late great Milton Berle was asked why he took other comedian's jokes and retold them. His response was, " If you're gonna steal, steal from the best”.

I admit to taking this from two of the best, my shipmate LEX who posted the link, and Bing West, the author of this fine read....

General Bing West's Bio -

Bing West served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration. A graduate of Georgetown and Princeton Universities, he served in the Marine infantry. He was a member of the Force Recon team that initiated attacks behind North Vietnamese lines.

He wrote the counterinsurgency classic, The Village, that has been on the Commandant's Reading List for 40 years. His books have won the Marine Corps Heritage Prize, the Colby Award for Military History, the VFW Media Award and the General Goodpaster Soldier-scholar Award. He has been on hundreds of patrols and operations throughout Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Bing is a member of St. Crispin's Order of the Infantry and the Council on Foreign Relations.

He is also wearing a BOSTON RED SOX cap in the picture, so he is among the faithful of RED SOX NATION....awesome.

Without further ado, I give you his fine words.

SEMPER FI !


With the Warriors:
How our Marines go about the business of destroying the Taliban

NATIONAL REVIEW
pub date: March 7, 2011

Patrol Base Fires, Sangin District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan

The view from this platoon outpost in southern Afghanistan is unobstructed, both visually and strategically. On all sides stretch flat, bare, winter farmlands dotted with walled compounds. The strategy is aggressive patrolling to kill and drive out the Taliban, who have acted as the rural government here for 15 years.

Beginning in 2006, British forces held on to a few square kilometers that constituted the district center. Their strategy was to fight defensively while trying to win over the population. According to British brigadier general Edward Butler, “the central theme of the counterinsurgency, winning the hearts and minds, was still core to our plans.” In accord with that plan, the British Provincial Reconstruction Team poured millions of pounds into development projects. As a result, the economy flourished. But the Pashtun farmers remained at best stolidly neutral and at worst sullenly hostile. Outside the district center, the Taliban remained entrenched in the farmlands, called the Green Zone. The farmers supported them, or at least obeyed their rules.

In the fall of 2010, the British forces left, having suffered 106 killed in four years. U.S. Marines took over and changed the strategy from trying to win the cooperation of the farmers into a straight-up assault to drive the Taliban from the 40-kilometer-long valley. The British lost an average of 26 men per year on the defensive; the Marines lost 26 men in 100 days on the offensive, while driving the Taliban north.

The patrol base, named Fires because of the intensity of the daily fighting, was at the northern edge of the Marine advance. When I arrived in mid-January, Lt. Vic Garcia, the seasoned platoon commander, handed me two tourniquets.

“If someone goes down near you on patrol,” he said, “wrap him real tight and watch where you step.”

Garcia explained that the Taliban roam in small gangs among the farm compounds, sow mines, and attack from the flanks. When we set out on a combat patrol, the 15 Marines walked in single file across brown, furrowed farmlands suggestive of New England in early spring. Lance Cpl. Colby Yazzie, a full-blooded Navajo Indian, swept a narrow path with his metal detector, while his Irish-American partner, Lance Cpl. Kyle Doyle, watched out for snipers.

Near a footbridge across an irrigation canal, Yaz clenched his fist to halt the platoon, then knelt down and scratched at the dirt. He took out wire cutters, snipped a few wires, and held up two small boards wrapped in tape. Glued to the underside of each board was a sliver of metal. When a foot pressed down on the boards, the metal plates came together, completing an electrical circuit connecting a flashlight battery to a plastic jug filled with explosives. Yaz attached a small charge to the IED (improvised explosive device) and blew it up, and the patrol continued.

In 100 days of patrolling four kilometers north of the Sangin district center, Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment had found 115 IEDs. Another 14 had exploded. Of the 136 Marines in Kilo, nine had been killed and 35 severely wounded. Of four platoon commanders, one had been killed and another had lost a leg to a mine. (The unit designations relevant to this article are, from largest to smallest, regiment, battalion, company, platoon, and squad. Lieutenant Garcia’s platoon contained 50 Marines, who were divided into three squads.)

After discovering the first IED, we walked north at a steady, careful pace. Not one farmer was out tilling the lands sown with mines. Yaz again clenched his fist, knelt down, disarmed and blew up an IED. The patrol continued for a while, then halted suspiciously at the edge of a large field. On the far side were two long compound walls, dotted with “murder holes” — small peepholes for the Taliban rifle barrels.

The Marines peered at the wall through the telescopic sights on their rifles. Suddenly, the squad leader, Sgt. Philip McCulloch, fired a single shot.

“Scratch one stinky,” he said.

(A few months earlier, in Sangin, a rocket had slammed into Mac’s vehicle, knocking him out. The doctors wanted to send him back to the States, but he kicked up such a fracas that he remained hospitalized in Afghanistan until he talked his way back to Kilo Company. A few days before I arrived, his squad had pursued a Taliban gang for two kilometers. After a bullet creased the inside of Mac’s thigh, he had avoided treatment at the aid station, fearing he might be pulled to the rear.)

Mac’s squad spread out along the edge of the field, which marked their northern patrol boundary, and waited for a fight. The rear security stopped a man driving past on a motorcycle. He wore clean clothes and his hands bore no calluses. He said he was an out-of-work mullah.

Lieutenant Garcia sensed that the man was a “dicker,” part of the Taliban’s unarmed warning network. But, lacking any evidence, he told him to leave. On his third combat tour, Garcia was the sole officer at Patrol Base Fires. He accompanied most patrols, while letting the squad leaders run the show. Garcia was the second officer to command the platoon at Fires. His predecessor had been shot and killed. The unquestioned leader, he kept a short leash on McCulloch’s attack instincts.

After waiting a while at the field, Garcia signaled to McCulloch to head back south.

“The stinkies aren’t playing,” Garcia said. “The game’s not in their favor.”

Like football teams, fighting units at the tactical level display distinct styles. The Taliban style reminded me of the rice paddies south of Da Nang in 1966, where the Viet Cong used the same tactics and the Marines countered with small, aggressive patrols.

The tactics are simple and effective. The Taliban’s warning net allows small teams to slip into tree lines in front of the Marine patrols. When the patrol file crosses an open field, the Taliban open fire, hoping for a hit or a rash rush by the Marines across a minefield.

The Marines’ counter is equally simple. One element peels off to flank the enemy, while another keeps aimed fire on the enemy position. If the Taliban remains too long in a fixed location, indirect fire (fire without a line of sight to the target, as from artillery) is called in. Every Marine has a telescopic rifle, and most of the fleeting targets are about 400 meters distant.

Yaz was leading the patrol back by a different route across a furrowed field when he stopped a third time. Again he uncovered a pressure-plate IED.

“That’s crazy,” McCulloch said. “An IED in the middle of nowhere.”

That IED was sure to blow the legs off a passing farmer — or a Marine. Yaz pointed to three small rocks several feet away, a tipoff for a passing Taliban gang that there was a mine in the vicinity.

A few minutes later, we walked past a crumbled wall, startling two dark brown coyotes. Again Yaz stopped, knelt, and disarmed a pressure plate. Four mines in the path of one patrol, and he had found them all.

When Kilo arrived in early October, 1st Sgt. Chris Melendez said to the troops, “I’m telling you now — some of you will go home missing arms or legs. I know that sounds hard, but God won’t give you any burden you can’t handle. So go out there, kill the enemy, and don’t flinch.”

The worst incident occurred in mid-October, just after the Marines moved into Patrol Base Fires. When a squad patrol slipped into a canal to avoid machine-gun fire, one Marine stepped on a pressure plate. Rushing to staunch his bleeding, another Marine ran forward and detonated another mine. The squad leader went down next, hit by the machine gun. A corpsman running to help the injured triggered the third mine, losing both legs.

As the dead and wounded were evacuated by helicopter, the Taliban pressed forward. They had diverted a nearby canal to flood the fields around the patrol base. Capt. Nick Johnson, the Kilo Company commander, and every available Marine at the nearby company base waded through the fields in chest-high mud to carry ammunition to the patrol base. Johnson then gathered the exhausted Marines inside Fires.

“In 1950,” he said, “this battalion walked out of the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, beating off thousands of Chinese soldiers. Now it’s your turn. Come morning, we’re taking the fight to them.”

After that, every day that the platoon went out, they killed more and learned more.

Back at the crumbled wall, Garcia decided to leave the mines that lurked among the ruins to the coyotes and return to base. As they were walking by the field where Yaz had found the third IED, the crack! from a high-powered sniper rifle sent everyone to the prone. They flopped down just as a PKM machine gun (a long-range, reliable weapon) opened up with short bursts. Garcia sent McCulloch around to the left to outflank the machine gun. Mac saw one man sprinting away, leaving behind a jug of explosives, and he heard the bolt of a sniper rifle open and close, a sure sign the sniper was nearby. But it took Yaz a while to sweep for hidden mines. This gave the sniper and the machine-gun crew time to flee the area. Mac found a pile of spent cartridges behind a wall and retraced his steps back to Garcia.

The tone of a combat outfit is set from the top. The regimental commander, Col. Paul Kennedy, insisted upon discipline and aggressiveness. That ethos permeated the regiment. The Marines shaved every morning in the field and left no plastic food wrappings in the farm fields. On-call mortars tracked every patrol movement. “Close to zero” was the watchword, meaning that every engagement should end with Marines standing on the enemy positions.

In this case, having closed to zero only to find the enemy had fled, Mac’s squad returned to Patrol Base Fires shortly before dark. The Taliban don’t move at night in areas where the American thermal sights can detect them; and the Marines don’t patrol in the dark, when they can’t detect the mines.

At Fires, there were no showers, no lights, and no Internet. Evening talk centered on how to stay alive and kill. Snail mail took three to four weeks. Bountiful packages from the States included delicious cookies, warm socks, fleece linings for the sleeping bags, touching notes from third-graders, and piles of leftover Halloween candies. The men slept warmly in their bags inside small cave-like indentations in the side of a thick compound wall.

In the morning, the patrol went out again, pushing north two kilometers to a cluster of compounds flying the white flag of the Taliban. Through the centuries, armies have held aloft their battle streamers to signify group solidarity and power. It is a way of saying, “Here we are, all ye foolish enough to give challenge.” In response, the platoon had rigged a flagpole at the patrol base and proudly flew the Stars and Stripes, with the maroon-and-gold Marine flag beneath.

The Taliban bluffed as though they would defend their flags. Their opening machine-gun burst kicked up a dust line just two feet to the right of Yaz and McCulloch. The Marines lost no time in falling prone and establishing return fire.

The Taliban were split into three firing positions. The nearest was a tree line along a ditch 300 meters to the Marines’ front. Tiny figures were darting back and forth, popping off a few shots from behind one tree trunk and then another. When the Marine snipers hit one and a first sergeant visiting from regimental headquarters hit a second one, the Taliban fire slackened.

Garcia directed Mac to flank the compound from the west. He then told another sergeant to call in mortars. An F-18 radioed to Garcia that from 8,000 feet their camera pod had zoomed in on two men with rifles on the roof of Compound 38. Garcia confirmed that a prior patrol had reported 38 as abandoned. He radioed to battalion, where the air officer cleared the F-18 to make a gun-strafing run. Unfortunately, it was low on fuel and had to return to base. So Garcia authorized a mortar strike on the tree line in front of the compound.

Garcia’s coordinated moves took about ten minutes to execute and ten decades to develop. No infantry unit in the world can match the intelligence, the teamwork, and the coordination of an American squad working with mortars, artillery, and air.

Usually Taliban in the open pull back rapidly once under indirect fire. Sure enough, the Taliban fire stopped. Mac’s squad moved forward, blew a breach in the compound wall, searched inside, and found only blankets and cooking utensils. The Marines pulled down one Taliban flag, ignored a few others, and returned to base.

When we got in from the patrol, Sgt. John Browning, the leader of the snipers in the platoon, walked over to a wall with stick figures carved into the baked mud. Taking out his knife, he carved in two more figures. The Marines at Fires loathe the Taliban. They call them “stinkies” after the repellent smell of feces. They scorn their tactic, when under fire, of running to a group of women and children, knowing the Marines will not shoot. The Pashtun farmers tolerate or cooperate with the Taliban, who walk in their midst and are not pointed out. The Taliban grab children to shield them on their motorcycles, and the parents let it happen. The people will point out mines on the roads they use, but they won’t reveal who put the mines there.

The platoon at Outpost Fires has killed 121 of the enemy. We applaud pilots who shoot down five enemy aircraft by calling them “aces”; grunts win no such public praise, but they do keep score. At Patrol Base Fires, Garcia’s 50 Marines engaged in the heaviest sustained combat in Afghanistan. In just three months, two Marines were killed, two others had limbs amputated, and eight more were evacuated with other severe wounds. In response to this 20 percent loss rate, Garcia’s platoon has asked for a larger battle space to pursue the Taliban.

In Sangin, the British had spent tens of millions of pounds on “non-kinetic” (non-shooting) counterinsurgency, trying to win support by building clinics and schools. They opened up the main market, expanding trade and production. They focused on the people, but the people did not respond. When the British left Sangin, the Taliban still held the countryside and the roads leading to the market.

The U.S. Marines focused on clearing the enemy, with no expectation that the people would shift allegiances until the Taliban were soundly beaten. This approach has a price, because you can’t clear heavily mined farmlands without losses; but you can’t win a war by staying on the defensive. On the battlefields, the British are our closest allies and comrades; they will attack side-by-side with us. At the top level, though, there is a political divergence between us and them about risk-taking and casualties.

Our grunts in Sangin view the Pashtun farmers as bystanders, often aligned with the Taliban. Generally the farmers are seen fleeing or closing the compound gates when a patrol approaches. The people know the Taliban shoot anytime from anywhere. Whether the passivity and self-sacrifice of the farmers is due to intimidation or to religious or tribal solidarity is of no interest to the passing Marines, who know the fight is between them and the Taliban. Although they recognize the sheer hard work and misery of the farmers and say time and again that “the kids back in the States don’t know how good they have it,” there’s no talk of liberating the people.

Down to the squad level, most leaders are on their second or third combat tour. When they are hit, they hit back twice as hard. They are sympathetic to the people, but they’re not persuaded they can win over the tribes enough to make them go against the Taliban, including members of their own families.

The Americans at Sangin see themselves first and foremost as warriors, reflecting the sentiments of the regimental commander, Colonel Kennedy. I first met him in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2004, when he was a battalion commander fighting up and down the streets as the battle exploded in nearby Fallujah. Kennedy’s battalion of 800 Marines had 35 killed in action. During that battle, he wrote to the families back in the States, “Previous to yesterday the terrorists thought that we were soft enough to challenge. . . . By the end of the evening, the local hospital was full of their dead. . . . It will be a cold day in Hell before we are taken for granted again.”

In Sangin, an assassin almost killed Kennedy during a meeting with tribal elders to discuss the withdrawal of the Taliban. The next day, Lieutenant Garcia responded by pushing his patrol base one kilometer farther north into Taliban territory. The Taliban had read the situation correctly: Kennedy was their enemy, implacably moving forward. The Taliban throughout Helmand Province were not accustomed to the warrior ethos of the Marines. Marja and Garmsir, the enemy hubs at the southern end of the province, collapsed in 2010. At the northern end, the campaign in Sangin is likely to force the Taliban out of the valley by the end of this summer.

After that, it’s an open question whether the Marine battalions will stay to manage economic projects and mentor officials appointed by Pres. Hamid Karzai, or will pull back, placing Afghan soldiers with Marine advisers in the lead.

Sangin is not a microcosm of the war. It is not possible to extrapolate from Sangin to all of Afghanistan. Across the east and south of Afghanistan, the scale of the fighting and the performance of coalition units are too varied to single out any one district as typical. At the tip of the spear in the south, the morale of the grunts in Kilo Company is high. They don’t reflect on past policy errors or the future of Afghanistan. Strategy is the business of generals and elected officials. The grunts understand that American or Afghan politics may create a good, bad, or murky ending to America’s involvement. Instead of becoming entangled in academic theories about winning hearts and minds, Sergeant McCulloch, Lieutenant Garcia, and Colonel Kennedy measure themselves by whether they dominate on the battlefield.

That spirit — that warrior ethos — will always be critical to our nation’s security.

You can read more at http://www.westwrite.com/

The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, a.k.a DARKHORSE and one Marine's POV of the Battle in Sangin

The time I spent in Fallujah has shaped my life. It is hard not to think about it when you hear about the difficulties that the Marines are dealing with in Afghanistan. The death of Lt Robert Kelly in Sangin on November 9th demonstrated how tough the battle can be as he and many other good men will give the ultimate sacrifice, not unlike those who paid for Fallujah in the same manner.

Here is a good account, filled with straight-up-in-your-face Marine-Speak. This is one Marine's point-of-view of the 3/5, The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, a.k.a DARKHORSE.

SEMPER FI Marines....show'em how it's done.


Sangin, the Fallujah of Afghanistan, and what it means to your Marines
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 -

By David J. Morris
Best Defense red cell correspondent

Heroes and myths die hard among fighting men. The troops love them for the added dimension they provide to the savage grind of field life, the feeling they can give a guy that tells him that he is part of a grand saga, something that will outlive his own individual destiny. Eccentric heroes and acts of valor exist for those who need them most as evidence that a greater depth to life is possible, that sacrifice can have meaning. That, with luck, they will be remembered by history. And yet, for some reason, outside of the ranks such ideas about heroism and destiny never fail to come across as anything other than primitive fantasy, the sort of thing that if brought up in conversation at certain hipster parties will cause people to stare at you as if you had just given them a Hitler salute.

Nevertheless, these are exactly the sorts of ideals that are being tested in extremis in Sangin, a small town in southern Afghanistan where a single unit, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, has been fighting to make good on all on the hot talk about the new, improved, industrial-strength Surge and the Undeniable Genius of David Petraeus and has, as a direct result, suffered some of the worst casualties in recent history, losses of a magnitude that haven't been seen since the darkest days of the Iraqi insurgency, indicative of a vicious, locked-in fight beginning to collapse in on itself like a dying star, annihilating anything that drifts too close. Fifteen killed. Forty-nine wounded. Nearly seven percent of the entire battalion dead or wounded. All in just thirty days.

Of course, to the average American, there is nothing, absolutely nothing new here. In an age of stereotypes, what is a Marine battalion other than a gang of unfortunates and semi-literate savages, all of them hailing no doubt, from the unwashed, Jesus-addled, gun-loving middle of the country, colliding head-on into the hard facts of life for the non-college-bound? Sacrifice is for saps, so the thinking goes, God knows why people go into the service these days and to take anything more than a passing interest in the whole awful show is to somehow be complicit in it.

Still, whatever else may be wrong and misguided about the war, like the inadequacy of the Iraq-centric techniques being applied to a scene that bears little resemblance on a tribal level to that country, there is something immutable, almost Homeric, happening in Sangin. It's the story of a unit filled with boys far, far from home, consumed by ideals older than the Old Testament about death, honor and human destiny.

Within the tight-knit world of the Marine grunt, 3/5 occupies a unique position. It has seen more combat than probably any unit in the Corps and been rightly decorated for it: its members have been awarded seven Navy Crosses, more than any other Marine battalion by a significant margin. At one point, there were more Navy Cross winners from 3/5 than winners of the equivalent army award in the entire U.S. Army. During the second battle for Fallujah in November 2004, it spearheaded the offensive, seizing the notorious Jolan neighborhood, home to some of the war's most hardened insurgents and took twenty-one dead. Marines from other units have been known to talk about "Darkhorse" as 3/5 is known, with a mixture of awe and gratitude, awe at their combat record and gratitude that their unit hadn't suffered as many casualties as they had.

Of course, there was more to it than just Glory and Honor and local Iraqis, understandably, harbored certain convictions about Darkhorse. At the height of the 2007 Surge, as 3/5 was preparing to return to Fallujah, this time for occupation duty, the local Iraqi police force caught wind of it and complained to their American counterparts, demanding that anybody else other than "the butchers of Fallujah" be allowed to patrol their city. Even the Marines who 3/5 was set to replace had their doubts.

And for some Darkhorse Marines, the battalion has, at times, come to feel like an electron shit magnet, the worst sort of hard luck outfit, a unit where even the biggest storehouse of personal karma was sure to taxed to the limit, or beyond, out into that dim country where a guy begins to think of his own life as something not to be taken too seriously, death the final trip, something to be savored first-hand. Let it bleed, son, let it bleed.

When I was first embedded with 3/5 in 2006, one lance corporal complained, "We always get the shit assignments." Now, a reporter who spent any time at all in Iraq was sure to hear this sort of talk from tired grunts, it was the kind of personal Delta blues that all soldiers lapse into from time-to-time, but in this case, the Marine had a point: the day I'd arrived at their camp in Habbaniyah, word was just beginning to filter in about two of the battalion's most popular Marines who had been killed by an IED, including the gunner for the battalion commander's vehicle, a burly, joke-a-minute surfer named Morrow. Hard times are the lingua franca of the Corps, there has never been any doubt on that point, but this just seemed somehow unfair.

Standing there sweating in the battalion adjutant's office that afternoon, taking in the grim news, I could feel the heat and anger the Marines around me were giving off like an invisible sun. The fraternal mystery of the Corps never ran deeper for me than it did on that day.

And what a mystery! The idiosyncrasies that make 3/5 and the Marines in general unique were the very things that many reporters and soldiers in Iraq found outrageous and even criminal. If you'd just spent a couple months embedded in Anbar and then dropped back into Baghdad with say, the 1st or the 4th Infantry Division, you were likely to get this:

"Where'd you come from?"

"Out west, AO Denver."

"With the fucking Marines? I know how they do it, it's like 'hey diddle-diddle, straight up the middle!' -- F**k that, man!"

And on a certain level, it was hard to argue with them. There was always some vague, unexplainable feeling that came with being embedded with the Marines. Call it bad fate or bad luck or a conviction that living up to your own mythology was more important than living at all, but Marine units I've embedded with have always borne a different relationship with death than any army unit I spent time with. The GIs would gripe good-naturedly about all the close calls they'd had, treating death like some carping, churlish creditor, something to be resisted, staved off, for sure, but in the end, something to be ignored if at all possible. But among many of the Marines I patrolled alongside -- and 3/5 certainly stands paramount among these -- there was a tendency to get hip to the madness, the horror and rot of it, to embrace the darker angels of human nature to a degree that made your skin flush hot for a moment until you remembered that they were the ones watching your back after all, and for you and your admittedly-selfish purposes, that was a generally good thing. Madness, mythology, bad midnight sweats, these are all temporary things, no? But death, that thing, that other thing that happened to some and not to others and no, no, not to you, never to you, that thing was permanent. It was a little bit of warped, hard Chicago faith that some guys would inevitable come up with, living proof of what Sinatra was reputed to have said to a struggling alcoholic friend of his: "Whatever gets you through the night, pal." Selah.

But -- and this must be admitted -- the mythology works both ways. To the old mujaheddin fighting the Marines in Sangin, the town must seem something like the Alamo, a place to stand and die, a treasured redoubt where a piece of eternity resides. Just like armies, places grow their own mythologies like ivy around old academic buildings and Sangin has long been a trophy to the muj.

The British Royal Marines patrolled the town for almost five years and never quite got their arms around it, and in the end, the town accounted for fully one-third of all British casualties in Afghanistan. And according to the NATO commander at the time, the troops there saw "the fiercest fighting involving British troops since the Korean War."

I suspect it would shock the hell out of a lot of Marines to learn how much they have in common with the men they are fighting. It's like what Mao said: one invariably comes to resemble one's enemies. But then, for a young man in the heat of events, this is the most inconvenient of truths and one that can only be taught over the decades and only if he survives the war. It's the same lesson that the first banzai charges taught the men of the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal, what Pacific War vet William Manchester and author of Goodbye, Darkness, learned when he looked into the eyes of a Japanese veteran of Okinawa at an observance forty-two years afterward: in the end we learn and are shaped by our enemies and we take on similar mythologies, because, if for no other reason than the current apathetic state of America, who else could know you better, what you've been through, other than the guy who called you there and remade you and stayed with you through to the end?

David J. Morris is a former Marine officer and the author of Storm on the Horizon: Khafji -- The Battle that Changed the Course of the Gulf War (Free Press). His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate and The Best American Nonrequired Reading series