by Ed Darack
As his first order of business, Donnellan set out to visit every base in the battalion’s area of operation. After a brief stay in Bagram, the lieutenant colonel experienced the blast-furnace summer heat and choking dust of Jalalabad Airfield, then made a quick visit to the forward operating base at Mehtar Lam in Laghman province, home of Fox Company. An ardent tactician, forever observing the strengths and weaknesses of both friendly and enemy personnel and facilities, Donnellan carefully noted the condition of each base he visited. The massive Bagram struck him as virtually impenetrable—a small city complete with a Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and other fast-food restaurants, a huge PX, and, of course, a miles-long heavily defended perimeter encircling aircraft, weapons, and personnel of all types. JAF, too, he found to be well fortified and defensible, as did the forward operating base at Mehtar Lam. A week and a half after the official 15 July change of command, Donnellan ventured northeast from ⅔’s COC at JAF to Camp Wright in the frontierlike town of Asadabad, lying in the heart of the Kunar Valley barely eleven straight-line miles due east of Sawtalo Sar. Surrounded by the sepia faces of the steepest mountains on which he’d ever laid eyes, the stoic Donnellan didn’t quite know what to make of the scene at “A-Bad.” Flip-flop-clad Afghans in combat fatigues worked on heavy machine guns mounted to old Toyota pickup trucks; bearded, M4-toting SOF types in civilian garb coolly gazed at passersby from behind expensive black wraparound sunglasses; OCF (Other Coalition Forces—a term for CIA, DEA, etc.) mulled around, often toting leather briefcases; Special Forces soldiers zipped by on quad runners; even regular Army—and of course, Marines—counted in the ranks at A-Bad. While well defended, the camp—an accretion of tents, zigzagging rock walls, old stone buildings, all stitched together by concrete bunkers—struck Donnellan as a heavily armed trailer park.
“We can’t help you with security outside of Asadabad,” Kunar’s provincial leader, Governor Wafa, told him during a meeting with the battalion commander after visiting Camp Wright. “We need more money for police here.”
“How often do you visit Nangalam?” Donnellan asked.
“Never been there. Hear it’s interesting, though. Haven’t been past Watapor. Wouldn’t travel that road. Especially if I were you!” The cagey Wafa, whom Donnellan quickly began to think of as the “mayor of Asadabad,” responded through an interpreter. Even the open-minded Donnellan, who’d been warned about Wafa from the provincial reconstruction team commander at A-Bad, quickly felt uneasy about the man. “Really, we need more money for police here in Asadabad before we can get out into those other areas. I don’t know why you even go out there. I wouldn’t go on that road if I were you.” The evasive Wafa seemed almost complicit with the ACM—maybe not directly, but possibly through intentional ignorance of their activities. Or maybe he did have direct ties to insurgent cells; maybe even Shah’s. Donnellan couldn’t read minds and afforded the governor as much benefit of the doubt as was reasonable. He loaded into his Humvee and his convoy headed west, into the Pech River Valley, bound for the last of the bases on his list, Camp Blessing.
Partway into the chasmlike Pech Valley, the convoy stopped at Watapor, a village designated as one of the ballot centers for the September elections. Out of a plume of dust, the line of six Humvees pulled off the deeply gashed dirt road next to a small complex of buildings—an old schoolhouse and a police station. To the east, a matrix of boxy rock houses stacked one atop the other on the face of a steep cliff loomed above a field of corn that swept to the edge of the road the Marines had just exited. To both the north and south, the minuscule specs of man-made structures dissolved into the furiously honed Hindu Kush; to the west, the brilliantly sunlit Pech Valley melted into pitch-darkness. The convoy drivers powered down their diesel engines and the passengers dismounted for a brief meeting with the locals and Afghan National Police in the small village. With the mildly pungent odor of burning agricultural fields hanging in the air, the group headed to the police station, passing a crumpled mass of rusting metal on their way. This rusted ball of steel and aluminum, now overgrown by weeds, stood as an eerie warning; those who’d seen Ahmad Shah’s distributed video of the SEAL-team ambush had noted footage of a massive IED strike on a white SUV-type truck. That vehicle, the remnants of which the Marines brushed past that day during their visit, had been carrying the chief of Watapor’s police, who was instantly killed just a few miles west of Watapor on a section of the Pech Road known as IED Alley when one of Shah’s men remotely triggered the deadly blast.
After a short introduction and lunch inside the police station’s mud-and-brick-walled inner courtyard, the Marines headed west, on the final leg of their journey to Camp Blessing. As the pastoral landscape surrounding Watapor blurred into the background and the convoy sped toward the heart of the Hindu Kush, Donnellan pondered just what he’d find at Camp Blessing; after hearing so many stories about the lonely outpost, he wondered which of the many tales would reveal themselves as fact and which exaggeration.
Coming around a turn, the convoy rumbled into view of the domineering Sawtalo Sar, and the Marines soon eyed the village of Matin at the mountain’s base. The broad, flat plain they traveled narrowed to a corridor barely wide enough for a Humvee to traverse, with sheer cliffs on both sides and the frigid Pech River almost a hundred feet below. As the convoy slowed, each driver made sure to stay well behind the vehicle in front of him as he approached a blind turn in the road, a bend marked by a large, diamond-shaped boulder. Unbeknownst to the drivers, a couple hundred feet above the boulder, two of Shah’s men, one with a video camera, and another with a modified cordless phone, hunkered down in sinister wait.
Days, weeks, or possibly months earlier, most likely in one of the small houses high on the slopes of Sawtalo Sar in the Chichal area, one of Shah’s paid operatives carefully enhanced two blasting caps by squeezing C4 around them, then poured high-explosive powder into the bottom of a pressure cooker. After attaching the blasting caps to a modified cordless phone (cordless phones sold in Asia have greater transmission power and hence range than those sold in the United States), the man, who was known to work with his young son at his side, placed the detonator assembly inside the pressure cooker, filled the pot with charge, then sealed it with a crank atop its lid. Before the convoy rolled through, almost certainly at night, one of the extremist’s hired helpers buried the device twenty feet east of the diamond-shaped boulder, a point marked by a flat tan rock that, visually contrasted against the darker earth of the slope against which it was propped, was visible from hundreds of meters distant. After the ambush of the SEAL recon team and then the shoot-down of the MH-47, Shah was clearly looking to continue his reign of terror.
The first two “hardbacks” (standard, four-seat Humvees), one of which carried Donnellan, rounded the bend as the third, carrying eight Marines and an interpreter, approached the point of the road marked by the tan rock. Moments later, Shah’s triggerman rose from his hide and depressed a single button on his phone’s keypad, arming the device. Just as the driver of the third highback rounded the bend, the world before him went black as a concussive wave of earth shattered the Humvee’s windshield and enveloped it and its nine passengers in a boiling orange-and-yellow fireball. The powerful blast crushed the Humvee’s undercarriage and mashed the heavy diesel engine onto the laps of the driver and front passenger as it launched the vehicle airborne in a reverse summersault. Not a second later, the vehicle lay upside down, pointed east. Donnellan’s vehicle skidded to a halt; immediately the call went over the net that a Humvee had been hit by an IED. Bartels, constantly monitoring the radio at Camp Blessing, sprang into action, yelling for his quick reaction force to mount up in their heavily armed Humvees; within sixty seconds, the lieutenant had his convoy screaming out the camp’s gate. When Donnellan called Bartels with an urgent request for assistance, Bartels replied, “Sir, I’m already on my way!”
Three of the Marines had been instantly ejected from the highback’s open-topped rear; another three grunts and t
he interpreter lay beneath it. Hot oil, diesel fuel, coolant, and then blood showered the Marines in the front compartment, choking them as they hung upside down, suspended by crushed, hemorrhaging legs. As Donnellan sprinted to the smoking highback, he wondered just how many Marines had been killed by the immense explosion, then how many would be maimed for life.
Methodically chanting “Alla-u Akhbar, Alla-u Akhbar” as he watched the plume of superheated dirt and rocks settle around the annihilated vehicle, the videographer zoomed in on the destruction—then focused the video camera’s lens onto the scene’s magnified image projected by a long-range scope, possibly the Leupold pillaged from the SEAL recon team, and videotaped the ‘keyhole’ view of individual Marines, including Donnellan, fighting to save their comrades amid the twisted debris. Within days, Shah had the gruesome footage prepared for his next propaganda video. Released by As-Sahab, the video begins with Koranic verse and a computer graphic of an exploding and burning American flag, then shows footage of an interview of Osama bin Laden interspersed with old clips of mujahideen fighting the Soviets as well as bin Laden mulling about a training camp. The producers then spliced a translated interview of Ayman al-Zawahiri discussing how America was falling into the “abyss” in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had, but at a much faster rate. Ironically, the next spliced sequence after Zawahiri’s declaration shows a nighttime ACM attack against Camp Blessing—where the videographer clearly sees his ultimate demise at the business end of a .50-caliber machine gun—followed by footage of Ahmad Shah (with his face blurred out) launching 82 mm mortars at Camp Blessing. The producers then ran a quick clip of two of the fallen SEALs of the recon team and a brief shot of part of one of the MH-47’s gearboxes that one of the locals of the Chichal area must have recovered after Red Wings II. Then the viewer sees the highback rolling up to the tan rock . . . and the huge ball of flame that completely engulfs the Humvee. The scene immediately following the highback hit shows the Watapor police chief’s vehicle, the remains of which the Marines of the convoy passed just an hour before the attack, as Shah’s triggerman makes a direct hit on it, instantly killing the chief. In the propaganda video, the explosion of the highback attack is clearly larger and more powerful.
But while Shah’s triggerman timed the hit against the Watapor police chief perfectly, he struck the key that sent current into the blasting caps of the highback’s IED a half second too early—an eternity when trying to destroy an up-armored Humvee, even with a large IED. As Donnellan emerged from his vehicle he eyed the disorienting sight of a Humvee flipped over, facing the wrong direction. He looked up to see three Marines already on their feet, digging to get the trapped grunts and the interpreter in the rear compartment freed. The driver and front-seat passenger were both conscious—and calm. The powerful explosion missed direct-hit status by about six feet, causing the vehicle to flip over instead of disintegrating completely. As Bartels and the Marines of the quick reaction force roared to a halt, the last of those in the rear of the vehicle crawled to safety, with only the interpreter seriously injured; he had a broken leg that healed fully in a few months. The driver and front passenger, now completely coated in oil, diesel fuel, and blood, cracked jokes and even struck up a conversation with Bartels as the lieutenant worked with other Marines to extricate the two—which they did within minutes of the QRF’s arrival. In the end, as everyone in the Humvee fully recovered, the IED strike had failed to do much of anything significant. But the explosion was dramatic for propaganda purposes, like Zawahiri’s words in the same video.
Why Shah chose this convoy, however, remains a mystery; Marine Corps convoys plied the Pech Road virtually every day. Killing ⅔’s commander would have been a monumental victory for Shah, heaping even more attention on the extremist. But how could he have known that the lieutenant colonel was in the convoy? Shah had very likely been tipped off that the new battalion commander was on board; possibly by Wafa, or possibly by someone in the governor’s entourage, or possibly by a Watapor local paid by Shah as a lookout. Neither Donnellan nor any of the other Marines of ⅔ would ever know.
Relieved that everyone would fully recover from their injuries, Donnellan walked back to his Humvee as he mentally scrolled through the destruction that Shah had caused: the IED attacks, the mortar and rocket attacks, the police chief, the SEAL recon team, the MH-47. And now this, his own convoy. Unemotional, consummately professional, the battalion commander icily resolved that afternoon to do everything within his ability to allow his Marines once and for all to destroy Shah’s cell. As he reached to open the door of his Humvee, Donnellan scanned the ridgelines throughout the area—unbeknownst to him, two of Shah’s men stared right back at him and the other Marines from their hide—pulled the heavy door shut, then continued the journey to Blessing.
When the shortened convoy arrived in the late afternoon, the three rear Humvees returning to A-Bad with the injured Marines and the interpreter, the shadows of the peaks rising to the west of Blessing had smothered the camp in cool shade. Donnellan emerged to the greetings of Kinser. “Welcome to the edge of the empire, sir,” the lieutenant belted out as he rigidly saluted the new battalion commander. Having closely monitored the events that had just unfolded, by radio, and knowing that everyone had survived the ordeal, Kinser felt the urge to ask sarcastically, “So, what took you so long?” But the lieutenant realized that it was too early to start joking about the attack, especially with a lieutenant colonel he’d never met.
“Well, I’ve finally made it. Camp Blessing,” Donnellan remarked as he gazed at the various lookouts perched atop surrounding ridgelines, then took a deep breath and studied the scene at the camp: grinning members of the ASF washing their feet in buckets of water; Hamchuck and Henrietta lounging in the dirt of a boxing ring the Marines had constructed in front of the base COC; living quarters built not according to any master plan, but simply into the steep terrain; old Soviet and Chinese recoilless rifles, RPG launchers, heavy machine guns, and AK- 47s everywhere, not just dotting the zigzagging, razor-wired perimeter, but leaned against tables and chairs, suspended as decorations in the chow hall, even used to prop open a door. Next to the Humvees, intricately adorned, “jingled out” Toyota Hiluxes, with an array of weapons systems bolted and welded into the trucks’ rear beds, stood ready for some outrageous battle. Camp Blessing looked like some bizarre cross between a set in Apocalypse Now and a set in Thunderdome.
“EEEE!”
“Kinser. What’s that red—”
“EEEE!” From inside the COC, Molly, the base’s resident monkey, loudly emerged.
“What is . . . that? And why is it red, with a Mohawk?”
“That’s Molly, sir. Molly the monkey. She was here when we arrived. She used to have a friend, Mr. Peepers, but he disappeared one day. Not sure, but one of the locals may have lured him out.”
“Mr. Peepers?” Donnellan paused. “I think Molly needs to move along, too.”
“Tried, sir. Tried giving her away a few times, once to a villager five miles up the Waigal Valley, toward Nuristan. I got back from a patrol one night a few days later and found her dragging one of my frag grenades around by its pin. Lucky I had it taped!” Kinser laughed nervously. “One of the Marines’ moms heard about her and sent some red hair dye, then Bradley gave her a Mohawk one day after a combat patrol. She loves it here. But we gotta make sure she keeps away from grenades!”
“What’s with those dogs?” Donnellan asked. “In that boxing ring?”
Kinser recounted the “Special Forces dogs” story. “We have boxing matches, every Friday—so long as we’re not getting attacked, that is. If you stay long enough you’ll get to see the 107 mm rockets land just short of the perimeter. Pretty exciting, sir!”
As much as he wanted to remain at the “tip of the spear,” however, Donnellan left the unorthodox fire base a few hours later, having noted a few suggestions for changes.
“Work with Tom Wood to get an op together. Get a full suite of concepts—conventi
onal schemes of maneuver,” Donnellan instructed Captain Matt Tracy, with whom he’d arrived in Afghanistan on the same flight. “We’re not gonna get him through any high-speed, sexy, helo-inserted raid in the middle of the night.”
“Roger,” responded Tracy, who personally likened ⅔’s situation after Red Wings to a third-quarter 20-0 enemy advantage . . . and after the IED hit to a fourth-quarter, 30-0 near shutout. Tracy, who came in to work with Tom Wood as the assistant to the OpsO, had just finished the nine-month-long Expeditionary Warfighting School, or EWS, in Quantico, Virginia. Designed to prepare USMC infantry officers at captain level for combat operation planning and development, the course work had covered a compendium of skills, from maneuver strategy to fire support, to deconfliction, to a comprehensive knowledge of the Marine Corps Planning Process, a regimented methodology of formulating combat operations rooted in traditional conventional-maneuver war fighting. Central to this process is the development of multiple “courses of action,” so that the command staff has a pool from which to choose the very best course, or the capacity to construct one with the best aspects from the pool. Tracy developed two and Wood devised one. And while the battalion would ultimately choose Wood’s, Tracy had shown that he possessed both an uncanny instinct for tactical planning and a quick-firing mind that was ideal for tracking the complexities of an ever-developing combat operation; this led to his designation by the battalion as the fire-support coordinator for the upcoming op, a crucial role requiring the interface of the key elements of artillery, mortar, and close air-support fire with ground-troop maneuver. He also came up with the name of the operation: Whalers, after the New England Whalers hockey team.
