Victory Point

by Ed Darack

  At 2:40:50, Shah receives a transmission on his ICOM from his second team requesting more rounds for their weapons. As the sky turns darker, a deep boom of thunder echoes throughout the ridges and valleys of Sawtalo Sar, apparently signaling Shah and his men to seek shelter from the impending storm. The footage ends with Shah throwing his PK over his shoulder at 2:43, then moving to head down the trail, possibly to search for Luttrell.

  In the distributed video, the producers included a clip of a standard, conventional “ring flight” of Task Force Sabre CH-47 Chinooks (clearly conventional Chinooks, as they lack refueling probes) heading up the Pech River Valley with Apache escorts, included possibly to intimate the upcoming MH-47 shoot-down. However, since both videographers traveled with Shah after the linkup, and since his RPG gunner can’t be seen in the video after the entire crew pillages the SEALs’ bodies, the man who downed the MH-47 probably returned to the summit of the mountain with one or two of Shah’s men (and no videographer), and possibly under orders from the terrorist leader, waited for the rescue helicopters with the intention of shooting one down. More likely, however, the RPG gunner and the others in the cell went to the SEAL insert site to find other gear, gear that the recon team may have cached (such as the fastrope), and then just chanced upon the Task Force Brown Chinooks attempting to insert the SEAL rescue team. Had Shah reasoned that a rescue attempt by helicopter was imminent, he assuredly would have sent at least one of his videographers with the RPG gunner to capture the fiery downing for his propaganda campaign. In the end, however, Shah and his crew really just hit a dark, disastrously spectacular streak of luck. With a total of nineteen servicemen killed in a matter of hours, 28 June 2005 went into the history books as not only the greatest single-day loss of American life in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war nearly four years prior, but the greatest disaster for the 160th, Navy Special Operations Forces, and all of USSOCOM since the command’s founding in 1987.

  Shah instantly rocketed into the stratosphere of global terrorist infamy, boosted there not only by the Web posting of his As-Sahab Media video (which never circulated very broadly), but by embarrassingly flawed global media accounts of the tragedy. News outlets printed, televised, and broadcast a host of errors, from the actual name of the operation, calling it “Operation Redwing” or “Operation Red Wing” to calling Shah “one of Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenants” or a “top Taliban commander,” to claiming that Shah commanded an army of hundreds or even thousands of Taliban fighters (both videos, later analyzed and authenticated by U.S. military intelligence, showed eight, including Shah himself; furthermore, extremist “commanders” typically lie and exaggerate about how many fighters they command, often multiplying by tens, even hundreds). Media reports also initially claimed that the MH-47 had been shot down by an SA-7 shoulder-launched, heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile, and after being struck by the warhead, the Chinook lumbered through the air for a good mile before setting down on a cliff edge, which crumbled beneath the craft, sending the MH-47 plunging to its destruction. Even a relative neophyte like Shah was able to leverage the error-laden media coverage to his benefit, claiming, after learning of American forces rescuing Luttrell and discovering the bodies of Murphy and Dietz, that he had the fourth member of the team (Axelson) in hiding with him, and would behead the SEAL in a videotaped spectacle. The global media even got the Gulab story wrong, never mentioning Shina, Matt Bartels, or Camp Blessing, and claiming that Gulab himself walked to American forces—at Asadabad.

  In the days following the rescue of Luttrell, Marines of Golf Company’s First Platoon, under the command of First Lieutenant Kyle Corcoran, entered Salar Ban and made a brief visit with Gulab as part of the company’s sweep up the Shuryek. The villager seemed to be doing well, but was terribly worried about retaliation from Shah, and had asked to be moved to Asadabad with his family, but was unable to get a response from any Americans at Asadabad’s Camp Wright. In mid-July, as Red Wings II wound down, Gulab showed up at Camp Blessing; he met with Matt Bartels and discussed Shina’s harsh treatment at the hands of SOF interrogators, then revealed that while Shina was given money and a number of valuable items as payment for aiding in Luttrell’s rescue, he had received nothing. Gulab also told Matt of a number of death threats against him and his family, and showed him a list, left with a death threat on his doorstep, of the Taliban’s most wanted dead. Number one was George W. Bush; number two, the commander of Camp Blessing; number three, Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Matt, laughing at the list—but not at the death threats against Gulab and his family—immediately got on the line with Rob Scott, who pushed a request all the way up the channels to CJTF-76. Within weeks, Gulab had a job and house in Asadabad, and received a reward for helping save Marcus Luttrell.

  Many of ⅔’s grunts had spent nearly three weeks in the field by the time Red Wings II had come to an end. Their feet bloodied from tromping up and down endless miles of mountainous terrain, their bodies enervated from the heat of the day, the cold and wet of the night, the dehydration, and for some, dysentery, the Marines nevertheless came out of the campaign much tougher and much fitter, ready for the next challenge.

  And while Red Wings had been marred nearly from its beginning by tragedy, the battalion did uncover a few weapons caches—the lifeblood of cells such as Shah’s—during their tromps through the Korangal and Shuryek. But the most notable gash in the region’s network of ACM support during this time came from a simple patrol led by Bartels, a small mission not even theoretically part of Red Wings or Red Wings II. As all eyes focused on Sawtalo Sar for the recovery effort, Matt decided to act on some intel that Westerfield had given him in early June, intel that he’d been instructed to act on only if he found the time—it wasn’t considered priority. The information pointed to a possible cache of weapons, a potentially large number of munitions in a home owned by a man who at one time supported the Taliban and whose brother had been hauled off to Guantánamo Bay as an active Taliban fighter; he was also someone Westerfield believed could be supporting Shah’s operations. With a lack of activity around Camp Blessing during the recovery effort on Sawtalo Sar, Matt deliberately chose the Fourth of July to pay a visit to the house, located northeast of Nangalam in the Waigal Valley, the corridor linking the Kunar’s Pech Valley with Nuristan, and check for any ACM fire-works. He passed the request to Rob Scott, who approved it, provided he stay outside the wire no more than twelve hours. Arriving during midmorning of the Fourth with a small contingent of Marines, including Justin Bradley, and ten ASF, Matt, speaking through Sultan, bluntly asked the man if he’d been hiding any weapons—mortars, rockets, RPGs, machine guns, rounds, etc. Responding with a resounding no, the Afghan invited Matt, Sultan, and Justin into his home, and offered them tea. As Bradley spoke with the onetime Taliban supporter, the sly Matt counted off the length of interior walls with his footsteps. Asking to be excused to speak with the waiting members of the ASF, the lieutenant then counted off the length of the home’s exterior. When the numbers didn’t add up, Matt produced a wad of cash, telling the man that if he put a hole in the wall before him, and sunshine came through, he’d give him the money. The Afghan began sweating profusely and took a step backward. “Bradley,” Matt said, motioning to the stocky corporal, “can you—”

  “I’d be delighted, sir.” The Montanan stood in front of the rock wall, and with a stiff kick knocked a hole big enough for him to stick his head through. “No sunlight, sir. Got a match?” Matt gave him a momentarily stunned look, then realized the joke. “Just kidding,” Bradley said. “I know it’s the Fourth of July and all, sir.”

  Inside the wall, illuminated by the corporal’s small flashlight, stacks upon stacks of 107 mm rockets—the type that Camp Blessing had been receiving for the past month—stood in dusty waiting. Bradley and Marines of his squad knocked man-size holes in the house’s other false walls, finding a total of two hundred Chinese-made 107 mm rockets, two hundred 82 mm mortar rounds (another favorite munition of Shah’
s for attacking Camp Blessing), mortar tubes and base plates, RPG launchers, RPG rounds, AK-47s, PK machine guns, boxes upon boxes of ammunition—literally tons of munitions, requiring four convoys to remove and transport to Blessing (Matt would designate much of it to be used by the ASF for camp defense). Enough weapons had been removed to keep an operation like Shah’s running for years. Bartels, knowing full well that ACM supporters rarely kept all their weapons in one location, returned to another of the man’s properties, a small store, the dimensions of which the lieutenant again determined didn’t add up. This time around, however, Matt had with him a Marine Corps combat engineer, who recommended against Bradley kicking any holes in walls housing old, potentially unstable explosives. With everyone a good distance back, the engineer set off a small charge of C4, leveling half of the store and revealing another ton of rockets and mortars. In the days following, the now-exposed ACM supporter had his grandchildren haul five truckloads of dangerous munitions to Camp Blessing. “He’s had enough of you. He’s decided that you can have it all,” one of the grandkids told Matt.

  “Sorry, took longer than twelve hours, sir,” Bartels informed Rob Scott.

  “Not a problem, Bartels. You did good there at ‘the edge of the empire. ’ That’s by far the biggest ACM cache yet. That makes you the cache king, Lieutenant.”

  Matt laughed, but Rob’s pronouncement would hold true to the very end of the deployment, as the 4 July find remained the single largest the battalion uncovered during their entire tour. But it wasn’t the last for the Blessing Marines, who would uncover a total of thirty-four stores of weapons during their seven months in-country.

  Although Shah had been deprived of a massive store of weapons, his exploits brought him assets far more valuable—notoriety and hence fighters. With the world’s eyes focused on the tragedy in the Kunar, and with hate-filled Islamic extremists, both well seasoned and fresh out of ideological madrassas, looking to achieve fundamentalist glory for themselves, Shah looked to see his ranks swell in numbers. And even as the dust settled from the tragedies of Red Wings and attacks quieted in the area with Shah’s absconding to Pakistan, the clock continued to tick ever more loudly toward the Afghan national elections of 18 September, just two months in the future.

  8

  REDOUBLED EFFORTS

  Arabs, Chechens, Yemenis . . . and from many other countries. They’re all grouping in Peshawar and will come into Kunar very soon, to help Ahmad Shah.” Bobby translated the words of a confidential source, introduced by L.C., during Regan Turner’s second trip to Khewa, in July. “Ahmad Shah will soon have maybe sixty to one hundred fighters with him,” the source revealed. Regan learned that indeed, the tragic events that had befallen the SOF personnel and the subsequent worldwide media attention given to the ambush and fiery shootdown of the MH-47 had greatly enhanced the cachet of the cell leader. “The fighters will be here for three months, to help Shah in stopping the elections in Kunar, Nangarhar, and Nuristan with road bombings, mortar, and rocket attacks. Shah even now has an Egyptian who commands the Arabs for him. He is also hiring some locals—not regular fighters—along the Asadabad-Jalalabad road and in the Korangal and other valleys, to look out for him, and some to shoot for him.”

  Turner further learned that Shah had been giving financial support to an al-Qaeda operative who would be placing his name on the ballot as a representative of the Kuz Kunar district in the September elections; the extremist clearly sought a multipronged assault on regional stability, intending, on the one hand, to disrupt the elections with violence, and on the other, to sully the democratic process with an al-Qaeda candidate. To vet the accuracy of the source’s information, Turner asked a question about the shoot-down. “He says that it was not shot down by an SA-7, but with an RPG.” With that piece of information, and with the source’s confirmation of other details that had not yet made it into media reports, the lieutenant felt confident in the reliability of his source.

  “The picture . . .” Bobby held up a widely distributed Army-produced “wanted” flyer of Ahmad Shah as he translated the source’s information. “The picture is wrong. That is one of his assistants.” The source ducked inside his house and then emerged seconds later, holding two small, grainy color photographs. “These, he says, are actual, real pictures of Shah.” After the meeting, Turner asked a number of other Khewa locals to identify the man in the photographs; all responded with the same name: Ahmad Shah. “He will be back in the Chichal area, many villagers throughout there will help him. He won’t go into Chichal by going up the Korangal Valley, though.” The source motioned with his hands as he spoke to Bobby and Lieutenant Turner. “He’ll be coming in from the Chowkay Valley, the way he just escaped from the Korangal before he went into Pakistan, and then when he returns, he will come up the Chowkay Valley, over the summit of Sawtalo Sar mountain, and down into Chichal in the upper Korangal. If he has to run again, he’ll go through the Chowkay or possibly the Narang Valley—no Marines there!—then move up to hiding not in Pakistan, but in Nuristan. No Afghan Army in Nuristan, no police, no Marines—nobody!” The Afghan man chopped his hand through the air, accentuating his statement. “Ahmad Shah really believes that he is the new, reborn Taliban, that he can bring them back into power, and that he can be a big leader. If he returns to Pakistan again, he’ll be seen as weak, because he’ll be running away. He has to stay here now—and scare people off from the elections in the area to show that the Taliban is the only way.”

  “Coalition forces have no presence in Nuristan? None?” Lieutenant Colonel Jim Donnellan asked CJTF-76’s chief intelligence officer during a series of briefings shortly after arriving at Bagram Airfield on 4 July. Donnellan had been scheduled to take over ⅔’s command from Andy MacMannis on the fifteenth of July, and so he had immersed himself in the history and culture of the region, with an emphasis on ⅔’s three-province area of operation. But it was only after he arrived in Bagram that he’d seen the big picture of the battalion’s higher command.

  “No, there’s nothing going on up in Nuristan,” the intel officer confidently replied. “There’s no reason for any of our forces to get up there.” Having finished his comprehensive historical overview of Nuristan, Kunar, Laghman, and Nangarhar provinces, Donnellan instantly put himself in the enemy’s shoes—and knew just where he’d go were he on the run from coalition forces (other than the tribal areas of Pakistan). To Nuristan. Neither Afghan nor foreign units were present in the province that abuts both Kunar and Laghman.

  Donnellan, who like Cooling with 3/3, would lead the Island Warriors through a successful seven-month tour in Iraq’s Anbar province following his tour in Afghanistan, was fully prepared for the rigors of the Afghan fight, but had been placed in the difficult position of taking over the command of a battalion that was already in-country without having trained with, or even having met, the vast majority of ⅔’s officer and enlisted ranks. But the six-foot-six, focused yet personable Donnellan had spent time with Tom Wood and Rob Scott prior to ⅔’s departure for Afghanistan, and given the instant confidence both majors inspired in everyone they met, the lieutenant colonel knew that his transition into the Afghan fight would be smooth and quick.

  The Red Wings debacle weighed heavily on the command levels above ⅔, however, creating operational obstacles both in planning and battle that would challenge and stress the Marines to the limit. Using Turner’s latest intel, which Westerfield and his staff immediately dove headlong into, Tom Wood and Rob Scott began piecing together a new mission, the foundation of which they’d conceived even before the dust of the Red Wings disaster had settled, an operation that would have the Marines continue the fight for stabilization of the region with redoubled efforts.

  By the time Colonel Gary Cheek and the 25th Infantry Division departed Afghanistan in the spring of 2005, Afghanistan’s top Army commanders (bolstered in large measure by the successes of 3/3’s Operation Spurs) took the position that organized, violent resistance in RC-East was finished, and only
small pockets of terrorists remained—tiny (albeit deadly and possibly al-Qaeda-linked) cells that possessed neither the means nor the desire to become organized movements like the Taliban. The Red Wings tragedy had shocked CJTF-76’s command, proving that elements remained in eastern Afghanistan that actively sought a broad resurgence of the Taliban or a Taliban-like regime, however unrealistic such a goal may have been.

  With so much worldwide attention focused on the Kunar after the Red Wings tragedy, CJTF-76 Command assumed a decidedly risk-averse stance for ops on or around Sawtalo Sar, leading to their virtual grounding of what Marines know as assault support—helicopters for the insertion of troops (although they’d still allow, on a very restrictive basis, Air Ambulance support). Whatever scheme of maneuver the battalion would undertake, the grunts themselves could move only by land, and because Shah based his operations far above and beyond routes navigable by any means other than feet and hooves, ⅔’s Marines would spend much more time pounding their boots up and down steep ground than bracing their backs against the jolts of rutted roads. However, as this new op began to take form, Wood and other senior battalion staff realized that the logistical constraints were actually an advantage, moving the plan away from a reliance on a covert direct-action team to pure conventional-maneuver warfare.