With his latest book, Bing West has reconfirmed his standing as one of the most intrepid and insightful observers of America’s wars over the past decade-and-a-half. Some have called him a latter-day Ernie Pyle. Embedded for the sixth time with soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, West demonstrates, as he has done before, Pyle’s empathy for the “grunts” who have borne the major burden of these conflicts. The empathy comes naturally, since West himself was a Marine infantryman in Vietnam.
But the author brings something to his accounts that Pyle did not: an understanding of high-level policymaking arising from his service as an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. These two perspectives—a grunt’s eye view of close combat and the policymaker’s broader outlook—have made West’s previous books particularly illuminating. This is no less true of One Million Steps.
The title comes from West’s calculation that each member of the Marine infantry platoon in which he was embedded—3rd Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (Kilo 3/5)—took a million steps during the endless and extraordinarily dangerous patrolling that the unit did in the Sangin District of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. West masterfully recounts the saga—for that is what it was—of 50 men who accepted the following proposition: Would you take $15,000 to walk two-and-a-half miles each day for six months?
There are a few provisos. First, you must live in a cave. Second, your exercise consists of walking across minefields. Third, each day men will try to kill you. The odds are 50-50 that you will die or lose a leg before you complete the one million steps. Still interested?
West’s thesis is straightforward: Brave young men were attempting to execute a flawed strategy. He focuses most of his attention on the brave young men. His account of their actions is riveting, reading more like a novel than simple combat narrative. The men of 3rd Platoon were locked in a life-or-death struggle with a determined enemy. The Marines knew that to prevail in this part of the world, they would have to demonstrate that they were “the strongest tribe” by breaking the enemy’s will. That lesson, one the Marines had previously learned in Iraq, in places like Fallujah and al Anbar Province, and that the Army had learned in Ramadi and Tal Afar, was chronicled by West in one of his earlier books. But the cost was high: As a whole, Kilo 3/5 suffered many casualties during its campaign to show that the Marines were the strongest tribe in the Sangin District. The platoon contributed its share in blood.
West demonstrates a novelist’s knack for character development, enabling the reader to get to know the Marines in the platoon. But an unexpected consequence of his approach is that the reader will often be shocked when one of the Marines he or she has come to know becomes a casualty. In this way, West invites the reader to share the emotion of the Marines themselves as they load a dead or wounded comrade onto a medevac helicopter.
West notes a major difference between his experience as a Marine in Vietnam and that of soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because of the individual replacement policy of the Army and Marine Corps in Vietnam, a fighting man might die in combat without anyone really knowing him. Not so for today’s soldier or Marine. In an 800-man battalion, one individual is likely to know 200 others by their first names, which means that when 3rd Platoon lost a man, it had an effect not only on his platoon-mates but throughout the battalion: “When a grunt was killed [in Sangin], everyone in the company knew him personally. In 3/5, it was especially tough because the deaths were coming only a few days apart. On average, a battalion in Afghanistan lost one man a month; 3/5 had lost twenty in two months.” While supplanting the Vietnam-era individual replacement system with unit rotation has enhanced unit cohesion, it has also created a certain kind of stress.
One Million Steps reveals the essence of small-unit combat, the very soul of war. This kind of war is not for everyone. The Marines of 3rd Platoon, Kilo Company proved to be a cohesive bunch: They lived together, fought together, sometimes died together, and grieved together for those who were lost. But their grieving was not maudlin; it was, instead, the sort of manly grief that would have been familiar to Spartans, Roman legionnaires, or Napoleon’s Old Guard as they paused to remember fallen comrades, after which they returned to the business of war. In their approach to war, the Marines described here exhibit thumos, a righteous anger that allows them to even the score. They take pride, and even joy, in killing the enemy: “Through the daily kills, they shared the satisfaction of revenge. There’s no genteel way of putting it. [3rd Platoon] patrolled to kill, and they saw the results.”
While he clearly admires the Marines of 3rd Platoon, West is unmistakably disdainful of the counterinsurgency “strategy” they were asked to implement. West knows something about counterinsurgency, having been part of what is considered one of its most successful efforts in Vietnam, the integration of Marine infantry squads and local Vietnamese Popular Forces into Combined Action Platoons (CAP). West’s The Village (2003), based on his experience with the CAP program, is a classic.
Although the Marines hoped to set up something like a CAP program in Afghanistan, the conditions were too different to successfully implement such a plan. More critically, he avers, the counterinsurgency approach pushed down by higher command was contradictory, creating confusion at all levels. The official approach might be called “counterinsurgency by persuasion.” Just weeks before the Marines deployed to Sangin, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, announced that the strategy for Afghanistan was to be based on “nation-building.” In other words, writes West, the senior military leadership of the United States sought to replace war with “social evangelism.”
The model for Admiral Mullen’s strategy was Three Cups of Tea (2006) by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, which prioritized village-level projects over defeating the Taliban. “The Muslim tribes,” writes West derisively, “would be converted by the secular gods of liberalism—schools, electricity, and other benefits bestowed from America via Kabul. ‘We can’t,’ Admiral Mullen asserted, ‘kill our way to victory.’ Empathy was to be the path forward.” But this approach got things backwards. Nation-building depends on security, and security is achieved when the enemy is defeated. Thus, the Marines focused on killing Taliban fighters in order to break their strangle-hold on the district. This was not “killing their way to victory,” but, as all past counterinsurgency campaigns illustrate, while there are better and worse ways to “do” counterinsurgency, there is much truth to the insight that I learned from my Texas forebears: Some people just need killin’ before the positive aspects of nation-building can kick in.
The Marines have always taken “small wars” seriously. Indeed, they published a manual on the topic in 1940, based on experiences in Latin America. But in the Middle East, the Marines believed that General Stanley McChrystal, the senior commander, was making policy that was disconnected from circumstances on the ground: After gaining control of the southern portion of Helmand Province, the Marines lobbied to take charge of the entire province, including the recalcitrant Sangin District. In his recent memoir, Robert Gates criticized the Marines for parochialism in seeking to establish what Ambassador Karl Eikenberry called “Marineistan,” yet another tribe operating by its own rules rather than according to “jointness.” But despite high casualties, the Marines began to prevail. The shifting fortunes illustrate the adaptability of both the Marines and the Taliban. As Clausewitz once observed, war is not waged against an inanimate object but against an entity with a will, able to react in unexpected ways. The Marines adapted to the Taliban, but the Taliban adapted as well.
West ends with a candid critique of American political and military leadership on the one hand, and a tribute to the Marines who fought in Sangin on the other. He criticizes George W. Bush for expanding the mission in Afghanistan beyond our capability to execute it. He calls Barack Obama an irresolute commander in chief. He censures McChrystal for adopting an operational approach that focused on winning over the population rather than defeating the Taliban. McChrystal’s restrictive rules of engagement took authority away from those on the ground and made it much more difficult to engage the enemy. But the Pashtun tribes never split with the Taliban: “Rather than positively altering Afghan attitudes,” he writes, “McChrystal negatively affected the attitudes of his own troops.”
Mackubin Thomas Owens is the editor of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
