Man-to-man combat still key to military strength

• Decorated sergeant exemplifies never-say-die spirit
• Despite drones and technical advances, warfare success relies on fighters
• The U.S. Marine Corps marks its 237th year this weekend

A few years back, Cliff Wooldridge was on a typical path for a young man growing up in a logging town in the Pacific Northwest.

He graduated from high school, went to a diesel-mechanic school and got a job fixing heavy machinery used to harvest timber. Except it didn't feel right.

"On TV, all you heard about was Marines in Iraq, and I wanted to be part of it," Wooldridge says.

In 2007, he walked into the Marine recruiter's office in Port Angeles, Wash. His request to the recruiter was simple: "I want to be the guy you see on TV kicking in doors."

Days later, he was on his way to boot camp and into the annals of Marine Corps history.

Wooldridge, now 24 and a sergeant, distinguished himself in Afghanistan for actions that earned him the Navy Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor for valor. In brutal hand-to-hand combat, Wooldridge grabbed the machine gun of an enemy insurgent and beat him to death with it.

Wooldridge's exploits are not well known outside the Marine Corps, but officers say close encounters with the enemy are not uncommon, despite the increasing use of drone-fired missiles and smart bombs.

On the 237th birthday of the Corps, Marines today are battling enemies in a fight recognizable to their predecessors in Guadalcanal in World War II or Belleau Wood in World War I.

Far from being an anachronism, Marines say the warrior ethos and the desire to test one's abilities in battle is just as critical to defeating an enemy today as it was when a few hundred Greeks held off thousands of Persians during the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.

"About 90% of these Marines joined when we were at war, expecting to go to war, hoping to go to war," says Marine Capt. Patrick Madden, who was Wooldridge's platoon commander in Afghanistan.

"The Marine Corps is going to attract a different mind-set and different personality," says Marine Maj. Carin Calvin, Wooldridge's company commander in Afghanistan.

That mind-set is the specialty of the U.S. Marines, and the Corps' consistent success in molding men into storied fighters known the world over is exemplified in the story of Wooldridge.

Despite his enthusiasm, Marine boot camp was a shock for Wooldridge. He was an athlete, so the physical part of it wasn't so bad. It was the demands of discipline from shouting drill instructors that took getting used to.

But Marines such as Wooldridge thrive on the challenge and the competition.

"I started to enjoy it," he says. "I was very driven."

In 2010, his unit headed to Afghanistan, the vanguard of a new strategy ordered by President Obama that bolstered forces in Taliban-controlled parts of the country. By then a corporal, Wooldridge was assigned to Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines.

The Marines were sent to Helmand province, an insurgent stronghold and poppy-growing region in southern Afghanistan where coalition forces controlled only a few key towns. At the time, the Taliban moved freely through large swaths of the region.

Soon after arriving the unit was sent to Musa Qala, where the Marines were arrayed against Taliban fighters that wanted to hold the region at any cost. In June, Weapons Company was given the mission to clear a valley that held a large settlement in the Helmand River Valley.

They expected to confront the enemy but were taken aback by what they encountered.

"We ran into a hornet's nest," Calvin says.

The initial plan was to meet with villagers who lived in settlements strung along the valley, or wadi, to get a sense of the enemy situation.

"That all went out the window the moment we got into the wadi," Calvin says.

The Taliban tried to ambush the Marines at every turn. The roughly 125 Marines were facing between 150 and 250 hardened Taliban fighters who had established a sophisticated network of bunkers and trenches laced into hills in the high ground overlooking the wadi. The area had been seeded with roadside bombs.

Anticipating a clash, villagers fled the town. Families with all of their belongings, including sheep, cows and goats, streamed past the Marines. Insurgents from nearby towns flooded the area, determined to blunt the Marine offensive and hold on to the poppy-growing region that was critical to the Taliban.

It soon became clear why the Taliban had established such a strong defense. The wadi was the main route used by well-trained foreign fighters coming from Pakistan into the river valley, Madden says.

Every day was a firefight as Marines pushed through the valley. ​Dozens of Marines were getting injured, but unless the wounds were serious they remained in the fight, Calvin says. Calvin's company headquarters was down to four Marines. Everyone else was engaged in the battle.

Even Marines who were seriously injured left the battlefield only reluctantly, preferring to stay with their buddies.

Fighting their way through the valley took days. On June 18, about a week into the operation, Wooldridge climbed into an armored vehicle that was part of a small convoy assigned to take a hill called "the football" because of its shape.

​Within five minutes of leaving the secure perimeter, Wooldridge's vehicle struck a roadside bomb. No one was seriously injured, but the vehicle was wrecked. Wooldridge and his team got into another vehicle. They had barely moved before they hit another bomb and had to get into a third vehicle.

By this time in the offensive, the Marines had decided to alter tactics to get closer to an enemy that would typically fire at them from a distance and then melt away.

"Nobody had seen them," Madden says of the Taliban.

They would probe farther into the valley than ever before, drawing insurgents out and then sending teams on foot to cut off the Taliban fighters before they could melt away.

It wasn't long before the four-vehicle patrol was getting fired at from trees on the western side of the valley. (The account of his actions is based on interviews with Wooldridge and other Marines and the official citation.)

The turret gunners in the vehicles wheeled around and began firing in the direction of the gunshots. The Marines split up in an effort to cut off the Taliban militants. One team went south and another north.

Wooldridge bounded across a freshly harvested field toward the firing as a couple of his fellow Marines got down and fired at targets ahead of him. Wooldridge burst into the treeline and saw a militant emerge from a ditch and start to run.

"I shot and saw him fall," Wooldridge says.

Wooldridge's two teammates caught up with him. They moved quickly through the trees and stopped short when they came to the edge of a farming village with mud homes and walls. Looking down from a small hill, they saw 15 armed insurgents at the center of the village.

The startled insurgents saw the Marines and turned and raised their weapons. It was too late. The Americans opened fire. Most fell, but a handful escaped.

Marines watched as an insurgent carrying a rocket-propelled grenade emerged from a narrow alleyway in the village and stepped over the bodies of his fallen comrades. The Marines shot him.

This is what the Marines had been hoping for. They had flushed out the enemy and forced the Taliban into a close-quarters fight.

Wooldridge moved his team to another spot for a different view on the Taliban compound.

Just then he heard voices that sounded like men arguing behind a nearby wall. He peeked around the corner and was face to face with four insurgents armed with machine guns, assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Wooldridge shot two of them before they could react. He killed a third as the man was trying to escape. Out of ammunition, he tried to bluff the last insurgent by gesturing at him to drop his weapon.

The insurgent raised his gun and pointing it at Wooldridge, who was 10 feet away. Wooldridge ducked behind the mud wall to reload. Before he could put a fresh drum in his light machine gun, a barrel poked around the corner of the wall.

Wooldridge dropped his own weapon and grabbed the barrel of the machine gun. He slammed the insurgent against a wall and both men fell to the ground. Wooldridge rolled on top of the insurgent and began pummeling him.

The insurgent reached for a grenade attached to the Marine's protective vest. If he pulled the pin, both men would die.

Wooldridge broke away and got to his feet, grabbing the insurgent's machine gun at the same time. He aimed it at the insurgent and squeezed the trigger. It didn't work.

With the stock of the weapon, he beat the Taliban fighter to death.

Marines arrived to find Wooldridge covered in blood, leaning over the dead insurgent.

Not done, the Marines radioed back to Madden and requested permission to pursue the enemy. Madden's vehicles were coming under heavy and accurate fire and the Marines in the valley were stretched thin. Madden told them no, they had to return.

"I think I just killed a guy with my hands," Wooldridge told his platoon commander when he climbed into the vehicle.

Calvin was at the company command post, a vehicle with some camouflage netting stretched over the back, when Wooldridge and his team returned, dropping the enemy's machine gun at his feet.

Calvin looked at Wooldridge's blood-spattered uniform and at the weapon.

"The butt stock was shattered and broken," Calvin recalled.

The Marines captured other weapons and radios, from which their interpreters began monitoring the Taliban's radio traffic. Madden says the Taliban appeared "terrified" by what happened.

"It absolutely crushed their morale," Madden says. "They had no idea what happened to them."

Used to sniping at troops from distant and protected spots, the Taliban appeared to have encountered an enemy that rushed toward their gunfire for a duel to the death.

The close-in fight boosted the morale of the Marines.

"We had finally gotten in their backyard," Madden said. "We felt like that was the point we kind of got inside their head and broke their spirit."

Having been in sustained combat for 17 days, they were ordered back to the forward operating base at Delaram to rest. On the second day there, Calvin got an order from the battalion telling him to be ready to move in a week to Sangin, another Taliban stronghold where Marines would encounter months of hard fighting.

While in Sangin, Wooldridge took the oath to re-enlist for another four years. The decision was easy, he said.

"I love being a Marine," Wooldridge says. "I can't see myself doing anything else."