Victory Point

by Ed Darack

  “What’s the note say, Bartels?” Tom barked.

  “I just e-mailed it to you, sir. You should have it now. But it’s a real short type of blood chit.” Matt read the message to Wood. “If it’s real, somebody’s in really, really bad shape. I mean, this is barely legible—like its written by someone gasping their last breaths.”

  “Is there a name on it?” Wood asked.

  “Marcus something . . . maybe Marcus Little or Marcus Lateral. I can’t read the last name.”

  “Hold on.” The OpsO, now at Asadabad with a contingent of SEALs under the command of an O-6-level SEAL (a Navy captain, a full-colonel equivalent in the Marine Corps—one rank higher than MacMannis) in Bagram, made a quick inquiry. “Marcus Luttrell?” Wood asked the lieutenant.

  “Yeah. Yeah! I can just barely see it spelled that way.”

  “Okay, Bartels. Make sure that that walk-in doesn’t fuckin’ walk out. And hold on; someone at Bagram, a SEAL captain, wants to talk to you. He’ll be calling any second now.” The SEAL asked Matt a litany of questions. Bartels could only tell him the few facts that he had before him, and quickly sensed that the captain didn’t believe a word he said.

  “Well, sir. We have this note, and we have the walk-in who has seen one American in the village of Salar Ban—that’s all I can say.” The SEAL ended the conversation, then Matt returned to the tearoom with Sultan and Shina. Back at Asadabad, a line of SEALs, clutching their M4s, launched a verbal attack against Wood, demanding to gain access to Shina and get a grid on Gulab’s house in order to launch what Wood sensed the SEALs planned to be a direct-action raid/hostage rescue mission.

  “Look, this is just a friendly local somewhere, helping one of your guys. Hopefully there are more survivors that other villagers are helping, too—”

  “As far as I’m concerned, your career as a Marine is over. Fuckin’ over. Gone. You’ll be out of theater in less than twenty-four hours!” the SEALs spat at the shocked OpsO.

  “We have a Marine patrol literally one valley over from Salar Ban, in the Korangal. They can push into the village within two or three hours, get your guy outta there—have him within six hours, possibly, if we can identify the exact location of the house. Maybe have him within two or three hours, but we need to determine the exact location of the house first,” Wood stated, flanked by the Marines who faced down the SEALs along with him.

  “Marines won’t have anything to do with this. This is a SEAL mission. We’re gonna get our men outta there! Give us the walk-in. You don’t gimme the walk-in and I’ll—”

  “He’s with First Lieutenant Matthew Bartels, at the base he commands—Camp Blessing—at Nangalam,”Wood stated, then stormed out of the “meeting.”

  Shina stayed with Matt and Sultan through the daylight hours of the thirtieth, during which time the lieutenant and his terp worked with the elderly Afghan to pinpoint the exact location of Gulab’s home on a map. Salar Ban, like most villages in the Kunar, sprawls across a huge expanse of rugged terrain; even a large American force would need to spend upward of a week to locate Luttrell if a search-and-rescue operation required comprehensively sweeping individual houses (many of which blend into the mountainous surroundings so well that outsiders can stare directly at them from just thirty feet away without noticing a “house” at all). The Afghan, who knew his land intimately, knew just his land—and not a graphical representation of it, like a map. He couldn’t even give directions; he just had to physically show Bartels or Sultan—or a SEAL rescue team—himself.

  “What if we took him up in a helicopter?” Matt asked Sultan.

  “No way, his eyes have never seen the landscape around him without his feet planted firmly on that land, just like a large piece of paper printed with squiggly lines showing the terrain around his home means nothing to him. He needs to kick his own steps up those trails he’s walked for decades, with any outsiders who want to know the secrets of the villager’s mountainous world paying good attention as they follow closely behind him.”

  Bartels and Sultan quickly established a rapport with Shina, who, despite the drama of their introduction, now saw the two as friends, and extended an invitation to the duo to come to his home in Salar Ban. On the evening of 30 June, Bartels, now partially briefed on the SOF disaster, received another heated call from the SEAL captain in Bagram, who demanded that Bartels disclose the location of Gulab’s house.

  “I don’t know, sir. But as you know, the guy who can take a rescue team to him is sitting here at my base.”

  “Get him to point it out on a map!” the SEAL thundered.

  “Been trying all day. He doesn’t even know what a map is, sir,” Bartels explained. “He can’t even vaguely describe where the house is, sir. He just has to walk there himself, and show someone firsthand.”

  “What if we get him in the air? He can point out the location to a team from the air, right?”

  “No. He’s not used to seeing the world from the air, just from the trails he’s walked his whole life,” Bartels replied.

  “Keep him there. Don’t let him move. Absolutely don’t let your eyes off him!” The SEAL captain then tersely ended the conversation.

  Later that evening, a helicopter swooped onto Blessing’s landing strip, carrying two unidentified, bearded SOF personnel who charged into the tearoom, demanding, “That him?” as they pointed to Shina. Matt nodded, then the duo threw a black bag over Shina’s head, tightly flexicuffed the villager’s hands behind his back, and dragged him into the helicopter, which then roared into the night. Bartels and Sultan shot each other stunned looks.

  “I guess that’s why he didn’t want to go to Asadabad,” Matt said with a tone of disbelief and embarrassment, astonished that fellow American military servicemen would treat a local clearly trying to help with such unnecessary brutality.

  “Too bad we couldn’t keep Asadabad from coming to him, sir,” Sultan replied.

  Earlier on the twenty-ninth, as Shina journeyed to Camp Blessing, Ahmad Shah and his men descended upon Salar Ban. They’d seen a total of four Americans during their ambush, but counted only three bodies in the aftermath of the attack, and knew the only possible egress route off that part of the mountain struck through Salar Ban. Capturing a survivor, whom the terrorist could use in a videotaped beheading spectacle, would make Shah’s cavalcade of death and destruction complete. Through intimidation of villagers in Salar Ban, Shah learned of Gulab and the injured American he harbored, and immediately came to the shepherd’s door. But the reserved Gulab refused to turn over the SEAL. Had Luttrell descended into Chichal or any other of the Korangal Valley’s villages, he would almost assuredly have been handed over to the terrorist. But the SEAL had made his way from the heights of Sawtalo Sar onto the mountain’s Shuryek Valley flank, and Shah had just a few men in his band; violence against Gulab almost certainly would incite the entire village of Salar Ban to take up arms against the wannabe Taliban commander, and Shah knew it. After threatening the lives of Gulab and his family, Shah departed, having come just feet from Luttrell; only an earthen wall separated the two.

  As the SEALs interrogated Shina at their COC in Asadabad—and Luttrell continued to cling to life—the Task Force Red Rangers finalized their plan to move onto Sawtalo Sar to recover those in the downed Chinook and locate the survivors of the SDVT SEAL recon team. With air unavailable for inserts throughout the area in the wake of the MH-47 shoot-down, the soldiers drafted a plan where they would move onto the objective area by foot, starting from a point west of Camp Wright along the road connecting Jalalabad with Asadabad. Rob and Tom scrutinized the Rangers’ plans. The soldiers had done a “route recon” assessment of their intended movement onto Sawtalo Sar using 1:50,000-scale map sheets of the region, and determined that they could reach the crash site, roughly ten miles in a straight line from their starting point, within twelve hours; thus, they planned to have individual Rangers carry less than one full day’s worth of food and water, keeping light to move fast, with the intentio
n of resupplying via CDS drops [Containerized Delivery System—pallets of food, water, and other supplies dropped from the rear of high-flying C-130s] once at the crash site.

  With raised eyebrows, the two Marines openly questioned what they felt to be an unrealistically low approximation of the time the Rangers would need to traverse the incredibly steep and rugged terrain, particularly when factoring in the temperatures the area experienced at the height of summer. “These guys are used to short, helicopter-inserted hard-hit ops, which they’re great at,” Rob Scott explained to a representative at SOCCENT. “But as far as we have seen, they haven’t done many—if any—long-distance movements through the mountains out here. Their plan just isn’t realistic.” But the advice of the Marines—to man-pack at least seventy-two hours’ worth of food and water and to take a closer look at the densely packed contour lines on the section of the map representing the ground they would follow—fell on deaf ears. Commanders in Tampa, Florida, approved the mission, and approximately one hundred special operations soldiers, including members of Task Force Red Rangers and various ODAs, embarked on their journey.

  Two days later, after soldier after soldier went down with heat-and-dehydration-related afflictions necessitating a number of emergency CDS drops, less than a third of the original force staggered onto the crash site. The daytime-high temperatures deep in the convection-oven-like dark rock valleys just west of Asadabad rocketed past 120 degrees, sapping the troops’ energy and depleting their water. Meanwhile, Kinser, Eggers, the Marines, and the ASF along with Hamchuck and Henrietta, waited at Kandagal, while Tom Wood awaited approval for ⅔’s portion of the recovery effort. With the crash site secured, the restriction on helicopter flights into the region was lifted, and the grisly job of recovering the bodies began. Finding the fastrope wrapped around the rear rotor assembly, and with the stench of burned flesh and jet fuel hanging low in the air, the recovery team quickly determined that all had died instantly, the pilots’ hands still clutching the controls of the big Chinook.

  By 1 July, with no sign of Dietz, Murphy, or Axelson, and with Luttrell clinging to life under the care of Gulab (just four miles to the southeast of Kinser and Eggers’s location), ⅔ was approved to move. With Eggers and Joe Roy bounding ahead to establish well-concealed overwatch positions, Kinser led the larger group of Marines and ASF (flanked by Hamchuck and Henrietta) south into the depths of the Korangal Valley. With the larger group armed with light machine guns and mortars, they could provide immediate fire support to Eggers and Roy—who, in turn, kept a sharp lookout for any ambush Shah may have put in place. Of course, both units maintained solid comms with each other, as well as with Camp Blessing, the battalion COC at JAF, and Wood at Asadabad.

  Having been passed a series of grids of the possible locations of the recon SEAL team, Tom Wood contacted Kinser and had him race into action. Kinser grabbed three Marines, and with Hamchuck and Henrietta, they bounded south two miles to the village of Taleban (no relation to Mullah Omar’s group, the Taliban) and up one thousand feet from there in a matter of hours. “Nothing, sir. Not a damn thing. Not even a broken branch,” the lieutenant reported.

  “Here’s another grid. Keep going.” Wood knew that he could keep the tireless lieutenant racing throughout the entire mountain—just not in the vicinity of Salar Ban, as mandated by Red Wings II’s command. For days, the Marines combed the entire Korangal Valley, searching, climbing, descending, linking up with other platoons of Echo, thrashing their feet, enduring biting-cold monsoonal rainfall at night and blistering, humid heat during the day—without success. Golf Company, too, raced throughout the eastern and southern aspects of the Shuryek Valley, but also discovered nothing. Finally, with help from Shina, a SOF team made it to Gulab’s house and brought Luttrell back to safety on 3 July. A day later, the Rangers discovered the bodies of Murphy and Dietz, lying next to each other deep in the chasm of the northeast gulch. Axelson, who had separated from the others of the recon team, possibly to find an open area to establish comms with the MBITR during the height of the ambush, was found almost a week later, on 10 July, with the help of cadaver dogs helicoptered onto the mountain’s slopes.

  The American military threw a tremendous amount of assets at the search-and-recovery effort. Air Force Special Operations AC-130 gunships lit up the mountain at night with their onboard 105 mm howitzer, miniguns, and 40 mm Bofors guns; A-10s tore up ridgelines both day and night with their 30 mm cannons, and commanders back at MacDill watched it all, fed imagery from MQ-1 Predator UAVs circling high above the Hindu Kush. Closer to the disaster site, a forward command post was established on Sawtalo Sar’s summit, a post that included four different unit leaders, including Lieutenant Colonel MacMannis; all of them, however, fell under the control of commanders back in Florida. Far removed from the SOF information flow, Kinser, Eggers, and the other Marines wondered what the aircraft had been targeting—or if the barrages were just called in for SEAD prep.

  Early in the second week of July, the lieutenant was ordered to link up with SOF near the crest of Sawtalo Sar’s north ridge, above the village of Chichal. Once on scene, he directly spied one of the targets of a recent drop. Below him, at the outskirts of the village, a home on the edge of a cliff smoldered in ruin. A few hours earlier, based on time-sensitive intel indicating that Shah and his men had been hiding at the house, a B-52 from an altitude of forty-five thousand feet had released three GBU-38 five-hundred-pound GPS-guided JDAMs. “We did an off-site BDA [battle damage assessment, “off-site” meaning that nobody had actually physically inspected the damage, just observed it from afar],” one of the Ranger lieutenants told Kinser. “We have twenty enemy KIA [killed in action] and nineteen of their local supporters, for a total of thirty-nine.”

  Kinser shook his head in acknowledgment, then requested permission from Wood to do his own, on-site BDA, after Task Force Brown Chinooks pulled the beleaguered special operations soldiers off the mountain. He found a slew of dead farm animals and nine dead civilians, but nothing to indicate that any of Shah’s men had been there; although he did find evidence, in the form of written notes, that illegal RPGs and PK machine guns had been kept and sold at the house. The lieutenant stared at the destruction before him, the stench of rotting flesh wafting around him, and shook his head at what he felt to be rank overreaction—and once again, very, very questionable intel.

  In fact, Shah and his men had been nowhere near Chichal, or anywhere else on Sawtalo Sar by the first of July, having fled into Pakistan days before the GBU-38s careened into the stone walls of the home. The terrorist, looking to propagandize his way up the ladder of global extremism, clearly looked to follow in the publicity-through-powerfully-shocking-imagery vein of the 1993 extremist attack of U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia, where dead U.S. servicemen were videotaped being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. During the ambush of the four SEALs, Shah had with him not one, but two videographers. Once in the Peshawar region of Pakistan, most likely at the Shamshatoo camp, Shah edited and distributed footage of one tape, but essentially shelved the second tape he had in his possession, although a few copies slipped into the hands of U.S. intelligence (he possibly withheld the second tape because his image could clearly be seen on certain sequences). The distributed video, with the al-Qaeda-linked “As-Sahab Media” logo superimposed on the lower right side of the clip, shows a shot of the early-afternoon firefight after a computer-animated introduction depicting the destruction of the United States of America and a graphic of Koranic verse. As the videographer descends into the densely treed northeast gulch, the sounds of a heated firefight resonate in the background audio. Three of Shah’s men, but not Shah himself, then approach the bodies of the fallen SEALs in a clip apparently spliced onto the first part of the footage. The clip shows Shah’s execrable henchmen stealing the boots and wristwatches off the dead Americans. The final portion of the ambush video shows the gear that Shah was able to pillage from the recon team, including four helmets; three M4s; stacks of magazine
s and M203 40 mm grenade rounds; spotting scopes, including a high-power Leupold scope; laser rangefinders; night-vision gear; the MBITR; binoculars; and fragmentation, smoke, and incendiary grenades. Shah even got the team’s Panasonic Toughbook laptop, which can be seen to have taken a round to its upper screen. The video then shows a technician pulling the hard drive from the Toughbook, installing it into another machine, and booting the drive. He then downloads maps of the U.S. embassy in Kabul as well as a U.S. military paper on the ACM’s tactics, techniques, and procedures, one among a host of sensitive information kept on the computer.

  The second video shows Shah himself descending into the gulch with two of his men (in addition to the videographer). The audio pops with loud 7.62 rounds rifling downrange from AK-47s, then rattles with short, controlled bursts of automatic 5.56 mm rounds sent back by the SEALs. The terrorist, clad in traditional Pashtun clothes, including a Pakol hat, is carrying his PK machine gun and speaking into his ICOM radio, and one of the two men at his side is clearly a designated RPG gunner—undoubtedly the man who would shoot down the MH- 47 a few hours after the footage of their descent was shot (the second video included time code, and showed a time of 1:57:02 in the afternoon of the twenty-eighth at the beginning of the sequence, hours before the launch of the QRF). Apparently, Shah ordered one videographer to accompany each team of three men—essentially two fire teams—coordinated by Shah through his ICOM. The sounds of the firefight end literally seconds after the start of the clip—the last of the SEALs M4 shots can be heard ringing out at 1:59:25 P.M. on the video.

  The two groups of Shah’s men meet shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, chanting “Alla-u Akhbar!” as they rifle through the SEALs’ gear. The videographer shooting footage for the distributed video can be seen holding his camera and chanting “Alla-u Akhbar! Alla-u Akhbar!” repeatedly, then the camera zooms to a wide-angle, clear shot of Shah, holding his PK and one of the SEALs’ backpacks, with the steep, sunlit northeast gulch in the background. At 2:15, Shah, one of his men, and both videographers walk back up the gulch, where the time then jumps to 2:38. Under now-overcast skies, one of Shah’s men can be seen rummaging through one of the SEALs’ gear racks on a well-worn trail striking through greener, higher ground as the second videographer steps into the frame. Plucking hand grenades, magazines filled with 5.56 mm rounds, a strobe, and then a map and a compass, he exclaims in Pashto, “Look, an American compass! God is the greatest!” He then finds a pen and shouts at the camera held by the second videographer, “Look, an American pen! God is the greatest!” The man then runs its ink across his left palm, and with a look of australopithecine wonder, proclaims, “And it writes! God is the greatest!” The translated diatribe gives lucid insight into the depths of humanity from which extremists such as Shah cull their underlings.