Because there were no police stations or Afghan army units in most of the remote districts where TF 2/7 is operating, the Marines had to construct their own security outposts -- a herculean effort, given the lack of paved roads and primitive infrastructure. As Lt. Col. Hall puts it: "We have had to simultaneously fight the Taliban, build more than a dozen defensive strongpoints, train new Afghan National Police and conduct civic-action programs to win over the local population, and we're doing it. Our motto, 'Ready for all, yielding to none,' says it all."
He's right. Though his Marines and Navy medical corpsmen have suffered more than 100 casualties from enemy action since they arrived, they have confronted the Taliban, unrelenting heat, innumerable exhausting patrols wearing 40 pounds of armor, and persevered in the roughest living conditions I have experienced since Vietnam. More than half the task force has served previously in Iraq or Afghanistan -- some in both. Yet the unit's re-enlistment rate is 118 percent -- among the highest in the U.S. armed forces.
To link up with Company F 2/7 at Forward Operating Base Now Zad, we flew from Bastion aboard a British CH-47 Chinook helicopter with a sling load of ammunition. As they have since arriving at Now Zad, the Marines and their British counterparts patrol day and night to keep the enemy off-balance in this Taliban stronghold. Capt. Ross Schellhaas, the "Fox Company" commander -- and the son of a Naval Academy shipmate -- says, "Nothing in the field manuals could fully prepare us for this, but we adapt and overcome." And they have.
Because enemy contact has been so intense and casualty evacuation so tenuous, F Company has its own shock trauma platoon -- headed by Cmdr. James Hancock, a U.S. Navy surgeon. To ensure that the wounded receive immediate lifesaving treatment, he and his corpsmen mounted a steel container on the back of a flatbed truck and outfitted it as a mobile operating room. The "doc in a box" already has saved more than a half-dozen lives. When I asked Dr. Hancock whether his battlefield innovations are being adopted as "doctrine," he replied, "Not yet, but I'm working on it."
That pretty much sums up how these young Americans have responded to this difficult mission in Afghanistan: with tenacity, selfless bravery and resourcefulness. And that's why Sgt. Maj. Matthew Brookshire, the senior noncommissioned officer in Task Force 2/7, calls his Marines "the quiet professionals."