The Hard Way Out of Afghanistan Joël van Houdt for The New York Times First Lt. Terence Sawick patrolling in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. For years, in the village of Juz Ghoray, at the remote fringes of the Musa Qala District in northern Helmand Province, the Taliban enjoyed free rein, collecting taxes from local poppy farmers and staging attacks on any foreign patrol that moved within shooting range of an abrupt desert prominence called Ugly Hill. After a Marine unit found nine I.E.D."s hidden beneath Ugly Hill's scarred and caverned faces last year, coalition forces seldom ventured near it. Until one night this October, when members of Echo Company, from the Second Battalion, Fourth Marines - known since Vietnam as the Magnificent Bastards - quietly sneaked into Juz Ghoray and posted signs on people's doors and windows. Their idea was to co-opt the infamous Taliban practice of intimidating government sympathizers with night letters threatening execution. The Marines" signs were bordered with the nation's colors, and in Pashto and Dari they announced: "The Afghan National Security Forces are coming." Two weeks later, about 60 members of Echo Company, along with 30 Afghan National Army soldiers, traveled on foot through the night and took Ugly Hill without a shot. At dawn, as villagers emerged from their homes, they found laborers stacking bastions to fortify a new Afghan police post. And something else, which many residents of Juz Ghoray had never seen before: an Afghan flag raised on a wooden pole. For the government, the new post represents a palpable extension of its reach, a triumph however modest. But not one without some cost. Before the Afghans could claim Ugly Hill, two marines had to sweep it for mines. Joshua Lee, a 26-year-old sergeant from Arkansas, located the first I.E.D. using a metal detector. As he set to work on the device, Lee identified a second bomb, and while readjusting he stepped on a third. The blast shattered his right leg, cocking it sideways below the knee and leaving mangled pieces of foot hanging loosely from flesh and bone. In the morning, while searching a compound at the base of Ugly Hill, the marines discovered three more fully assembled I.E.D."s, containing 100 pounds of explosives. When technicians set charges around the bombs, detonating them in place, a six-foot crater was left where one of the compound's buildings had stood. The following evening Echo Company continued south, making camp on a plateau of hard-packed gravel; as the desert night grew frigid, a small convoy arrived to resupply the men with food and water. Turning to climb the steep escarpment, the lead vehicle hit yet another bomb. Its mine-roller - an extended axle of weighted wheels that tests the ground ahead - absorbed the brunt of the blast. Walking nearby, a young platoon sergeant, Jacob Maxwell, was knocked off his feet as rocks and wreckage from the obliterated roller struck his legs and back. This was Maxwell's fifth deployment. During a single tour in Iraq in 2006, he survived four I.E.D. explosions. When the dust settled, he was sitting beside the road, cut and bruised, but otherwise unscathed. The corpsman who treated him judged his luck to border on the freakish. Nonetheless, after the attack, Maxwell assured me he'd be leading his platoon on its coming operations. Those will take the company even deeper into Taliban country, to farther-flung villages than Juz Ghoray, among Afghans who, more than 10 years after the government's creation, still lack any meaningful contact with it. "The Marines are going out into the hinterlands," Maj. Frank Diorio, the battalion's executive officer, told me. They're not tied to any posts. It'll be ongoing until we leave. It's just going to be continuous operations. The Marines didn't arrive in force in Helmand until 2009. Previously, the British controlled the region. Undermanned, ill equipped and far too thinly spread, they were unable to contain the Taliban revival already proliferating through Helmand by 2006. Only as recently as 2010 did coalition forces, bolstered by Obama's troop surge, try to cauterize what Gen. Stanley McChrystal called the "bleeding ulcer" of Marja - a town just outside the provincial capital where the Taliban presided unmolested over a lucrative opium industry. Today the Taliban in Marja have been killed or vanquished to sparsely populated desert regions, and Afghan security forces have assumed most policing responsibilities in the town. Successful as it is, the taking of Marja was accomplished with an immense commitment of men and resources that could not realistically be brought to bear elsewhere in the province. An analogy often invoked across Afghanistan is that of the water-filled bag: squeeze the bottom, the top distends. Accordingly, subdued in Marja and other towns nearer the capital, the fight in Helmand has shifted upriver. There, in places like Kajaki and Sangin and Musa Qala, after 10 years and 821 coalition deaths and thousands of wounded, the insurgency perseveres.