Victory Point

by Ed Darack

  “Roger that, sir,” responded Konnie, who assumed from these words that CH-47s, if not already en route, would soon arrive. After he and some of the Fox-3 Marines found and then secured a plot of level ground large enough to accommodate two Chinooks, however, the bad news arrived.

  “I don’t think they’re comin’ to get us,” Grissom informed him.

  “Sir, I want to be very clear when I tell you that I think we need an extract,” the lieutenant replied, with a serious, almost solemn tone. “We’re red on ammo, water, medical supplies, and with five Marines and the Rock now gone, we have a serious force-strength issue.” Konnie explained Fox-3’s situation, the term red referencing near total depletion of supplies.

  “Yeah, Konstant. I understand what’s goin’ on,” the captain replied, frustrated. “But from what I’m hearin’ on the net, we’re not gettin’ outta here—not by helicopter, at least. They just now almost lost another helicopter. They’re gonna do everything they can to avoid another shoot-down, meaning that when we leave this place, we leave it on foot.” Although Shah’s army, what was left of it, had scattered, solid intel on the enemy’s strength at that point, or about whether Shah was regrouping, had yet to roll in. With the area’s greatest threat diminished, and the clock loudly ticking toward the nineteenth, the grunts would continue to press onward with Whalers.

  As their conversation continued, Konstant and Grissom each killed a Marlboro. “So then we consolidate—Middendorf and his mortars moving to our position?” Konnie asked.

  “Everything’s evolving, every minute,” Grissom responded as he took a drag off his cigarette. “But that’s what I’d prefer at this point.”

  “You know, sir,” Konnie told him, “we’re also red on cigarettes.”

  “I know. We’re smokin’ like champs up here. Be bad if we ran out.”

  “Well, don’t worry. Middendorf’s got more. We’ll consolidate forces, and then we’ll raid Dorf’s smokes.” Konnie shot the captain a wry, conspiratorial grin.

  Grissom just shook his head, trying to hide his laughter. “I guess this is what they mean when they say ‘alone and unafraid,’ ” he stated.

  “Sir . . .” Konnie paused, holding back laughter. “At least we have each other.”

  “Go lead Marines, Konstant.”

  With that, Konnie set about reinforcing the camp’s defense, sending the two scout/snipers attached to Fox-3 and five other Marines to an observation point to the west of the patrol base. Pigeon, wanting to know how things in the area looked from up high, kept radio contact with two A-10s flying above the Chowkay. With a variety of targeting sensors, the A-10s would be able to pass information to the FAC while he directed them to sweep the area. When the seven Marines Konnie had sent out established a firm position, a sergeant in the group radioed a grid of their exact location, which Konnie passed on to Pigeon. But the seven were looking to find an even better location, so they set out to reconnoiter ground a few hundred yards to their north. Realizing that their initial location gave them a better view of the surrounding area, they turned back.

  “Konnie,” Pigeon said, “A-10s reporting personnel moving toward the snipers’ grid they just occupied.”

  “Movers, huh?” Pigeon gave Konnie the location at which the A-10 pilots had reported seeing the suspected bad guys; they’d approached from north of the snipers’ grid. “If they’re heading south to the snipers’ grid, then there’s about to be an ambush.” Konnie paused for a moment. “Tell the A-10s to take them out, sir. Tell them to take them out now!” he exclaimed.

  “Okay. That’ll be danger-close” (a situation where friendlies lie close enough to a target to risk getting hit). But Pigeon, studying his map and the terrain before him, had doubts about the accuracy of the grid. “I want you to do a show-of-force run. I repeat—show-of-force run.” Pigeon directed the A-10 to essentially perform just a flyby, without releasing any ordnance—showing, but not applying, force. He then contacted the sniper team; “One of the A-10s will be coming in—if he’s aimed at you, let me know. Let me know immediately.” The burly Warthog banked hard and put its nose toward the ground, the barrel assembly of the 30 mm rotary gun protruding from the craft like a blunt stinger.

  “He’s pointed right at us. Right at us!” came the call from the snipers as they eyed the fast-approaching bulk of a huge gun framed by a gray fuselage, wings, engines, and tail fins.

  “ABORT—ABORT—ABORT,” Pigeon boomed over the radio to the A-10, instinctively calling for the aircraft to break off its attack vector, even though the pilot had no clearance—or intention—to release ordnance. The pilot rolled out of the dry run, spewing flares on his egress.

  “Holy shit, Pigeon. I almost smoke-checked seven of our own guys,” Konnie remarked as his face turned ashen. “Man. You saved eight lives just now.” He paused. “Those seven—and me . . . from drinking myself to death before I reached thirty.”

  “Just doin’ my job, Konnie,” the FAC calmly replied.

  And with Fox-3 red on everything essential, Pigeon would continue to work his job at a feverish pace that morning—Jeremy Whitlock and his staff already had Fox’s vital supplies roaring toward the Chowkay. Cruising at more than a mile above the Hindu Kush, the crew of an Air Force C-130E Hercules gently pushed the big craft lower in altitude as they equalized the pressure inside the airplane with that of the outside air. On cue from the pilot, one of the Hercules’ loadmasters released the rear doors on the craft at ten thousand feet above sea level. The upper door hydraulically tucked inside the bird as the lower ramp folded and locked flat, revealing a roughly ten-by-seven-foot open-air “window” to eastern Afghanistan. The four powerful turboprops echoed throughout the Chowkay in a dull hum, announcing the approach of the Marines’ resupply. “Eyes on!” a parched, exhausted lance corporal announced as he thrust his index finger into the sky at the fast-approaching bird.

  “Pop smoke!” Pigeon ordered. Two Marines each yanked the pins out of purple smoke grenades and tossed them onto a drop zone Pigeon had designated.

  “Hope they kick that shit out at just the right moment,” Konnie mumbled under his breath.

  “Here it comes.” Pigeon craned his neck back as the Hercules swooped overhead. On board the craft, the loadmasters watched six large crates careen on rollers out of the open cargo hold and into space, drogue chutes deploying just seconds later. Banking hard after the drop, the Hercules disappeared behind a high ridge, leaving only the supply crates, swaying below their green chutes, in the sky above the Marines. The men were always on guard during CDS drops, since the heavy cargo could easily squash an unknowing grunt, but the parachutes’ trajectory quickly showed there to be no danger of a crushing death. In fact, the drop missed the area completely.

  “Off. Way off. It’ll take two fuckin’ days to recover that stuff,” Konnie muttered in a pissed-off tone. “Guess we’re stayin’ red for now.”

  Just over a kilometer to the southeast of Fox-3’s camp, Ben Middendorf, having decided to co-locate his mortar team with Fox-3 after conferring with Grissom, began moving toward Hill 2510. Not wanting to cover the same ground that Fox-3 had traversed during their push up the Chowkay for fear of walking into an ambush, the lieutenant felt it best to move by way of the terrain to their west. But Middendorf and his Marines were also red on supplies; the one-kilometer movement, down the steep ground to the Amrey Creek bed, then back up even steeper slopes on the base of Hill 2510—portaging the heavy mortar tubes—further weakened the already-enervated grunts. Arriving at dusk at an isolated village not shown on any maps, Middendorf noticed the chilling sight of a white flag waving above one of the village buildings—a sign of solidarity with the Taliban. Under the dying glow of twilight, the Marines greeted the standoffish villagers, then bedded down for a few hours just outside the tiny enclave—maintaining very tight security.

  While Middendorf and the mortar team were closing on the village on the slopes of Hill 2510 that evening, Pigeon worked with another C-130 on a seco
nd CDS resupply attempt. This time, through a number of low passes, the trajectories of which he computed with his map and his instincts, the FAC guided all six loads perfectly on target, one by one. “Pigeon,” Konnie commented, “you just continue to dominate awesomeness.” Completely green on supplies, Fox-3 would be able to fully stock Dorf’s mortar team—once they arrived. The next morning, with Fox-1 and the Afghan soldiers still providing security for them, the mortar team broke camp before dawn and pushed north toward Fox-3 and their much-needed food, water, and ammunition. Middendorf first led his team to the top of Hill 2510, to get a commanding view of the route ahead for the grunts. Scanning the distance, the lieutenant noticed two men watching the Marines—no weapons, no ICOMs, just two men observing them. Unsure if they belonged to Shah’s cell, if they had been employed by the terrorist as lookouts, or if they were just villagers walking the area’s trails, Middendorf decided to press onward. With the mortar team weak from exhaustion, dehydration, and now near starvation, he split the team in two to move by leapfrogging, keeping two mortars always ready to fire as the grunts with the other two tubes pushed northward. By noon, the Marines had drunk every drop of their water and their corpsmen had administered their last rehydration IV. With their destination just a half kilometer away, a lance corporal collapsed in the heat.

  “Unless you get up and fuckin’ walk,” Middendorf acerbically began, “you will die.” Each Marine in the team had deteriorated to a level Middendorf had never before seen; they stared at the lieutenant vacuously from sunken eyes—many having bent over with jabbing abdominal cramps and vomited. “I can’t explain the reason, but you will die, and possibly cause other Marines around you to fuckin’ die as well. Now get the fuck up! Let’s go!” Pressured by the lieutenant’s forceful command, the lance corporal staggered to his feet and fought onward with the group, which finally arrived at Fox-3’s camp a few hours later.

  “Hey, man. How you doin’?” Konnie asked Middendorf upon his arrival.

  “I’m doin’ a lot better than you guys. I’m glad you’re still alive. So what happened?” Dorf asked back.

  “I think we killed a lot of bad guys,” Konnie told him. “Is that bad?”

  “I don’t think its bad,” Middendorf replied. “I think it’s great. How’d you not get your ass shot off?”

  “I’m good at a lot of things, Ben,” Konnie said, “but I’m best at bein’ lucky, I guess.”

  The Chowkay wasn’t the only corner of ⅔’s area of operation during Whalers to witness bullets flying and sweat-drenched toil. Golf Company Marines continued to push northwest in the Narang Valley, and Kinser’s Echo-1 had penetrated deep into the Shuryek, moving up its eastern wall to Golayshal, the southernmost village in the valley, lying at the same latitude as the summit of Sawtalo Sar. The Jump CP, with senior leaders of the area’s Afghan National Army in trace, moved along Sawtalo Sar’s spine, then dropped into the Korangal, meeting with villagers during shura meetings. Donnellan, who sought to have the ANA capable of undertaking security in the critical valley as soon as possible, worked to establish amicable relations between the Afghan Army brass and the village elders. Through an interpreter, Donnellan learned that the inhabitants of Korangal village—throughout the valley, for that matter—had wanted a heightened presence of Afghan government personnel, be they police or ANA soldiers. But those villagers who spoke up—about a dozen of them in the past year—had been killed by anticoalition militia types such as Shah.

  “How many times have you been to the Korangal?” an elder asked Colonel Nasir, the highest-ranking officer in the Afghan National Army traveling with the Jump CP.

  “Never,” Nasir replied, after a long pause.

  “Why?” the elder asked as he sipped chai tea.

  “Because . . .” Nasir paused again. “Because I’m afraid of the Korangal .” This attitude was one the Marines would work to completely reverse.

  Also moving through the Korangal and along Sawtalo Sar during Whalers, Keith Eggers and two other members of Team Ronin, Corporal Joe Roy—Eggers’s twenty-one-year-old spotter—and twenty-one-year-old Navy Hospital Corpsman Third Class Jamie “Doc” Pigman, had been tasked with providing forward observation and bounding overwatch of Echo-3, who would be pushing south into the Korangal Valley. Long before sunrise on the twelfth of August, after a previous night’s meeting with Echo-3’s platoon commander, Nick Guyton, Ronin started up the steep Bakaro Ghar, a spine of gray, shattered rock connecting the opening of the Korangal Valley with the north ridge of Sawtalo Sar. Climbing along loose talus, around teetering boulders, and up small cliffs—avoiding trails to maintain concealment from any unfriendly eyes—the trio gained the north ridge by midmorning, as Echo-3 made strong headway into the Korangal below them. Then Keith received a call from Echo Company’s commander, Captain John McShane, who stated that fresh intel had revealed a sizable force of foreign fighters massed in Salar Ban, just on the other side of Sawtalo Sar’s north ridge from Ronin’s position.

  “Want us to check it out?” Keith asked. McShane felt uneasy; the report stated that upward of eighty fighters had gathered in the village. “We’ll be going right by an ideal overwatch spot anyway; we might as well,” the sergeant continued. Furthermore, in addition to Echo-3, Echo Company’s Second Platoon had been working their way into the Korangal. As well, the Marines of Camp Blessing had forward-deployed two 120 mm mortar tubes at the mouth of the Korangal, capable of providing instant indirect fire support, and Doghouse’s 105s stood at the ready at Asadabad, able to range to Ronin’s position with RAP rounds. McShane reluctantly authorized the observation—but for only one hour.

  After donning their ghillie suits (camouflage composed of densely packed, long strands of green and brown fabric for concealment in densely vegetated areas) and striping their faces in olive-drab and black camo paint, the trio moved into position and “glassed” Salar Ban with a powerful Leupold spotting scope. “Nothing. No fighters whatsoever,” Eggers reported to McShane after sighting just villagers—including women and children, who typically leave once extremist fighters arrive. Ronin would continue their overwatch mission for Echo-3 during the following days, preparing to link up with the platoon at Sawtalo Sar’s summit on 16 August. Those intervening days, however, wouldn’t pass easily. The amount of specialized equipment they carried—optics and radios, not to mention the sniper rifle itself and its support gear and rounds—meant that they portaged over one hundred pounds each, spread between their packs and gear harnesses, and like the other Marines of ⅔ during Whalers, they fought to stay hydrated in the intense heat. Searching for small streams while maintaining cover and providing overwatch proved exhausting. But the risks of their mission meant that they’d get few chances to truly rest and rehydrate—and they had to maintain the very sharpest of focus.

  “So, we’re gonna get overrun by Shah’s guys, huh?” Joe Roy skeptically asked on the evening of the fifteenth at their hide above Echo-3’s patrol base just outside of Chichal.

  “That’s what they say—based off the ICOM hits the terps are picking up,” Eggers responded. “Apparently they’ve seen us. But I don’t care how many times I’ve heard it and it turned out to be bullshit, we’re not taking any chances.” The three of them set claymore antipersonnel mines around a solid, densely treed “harbor site” at the top of steep ground above Chichal in which they’d remain concealed for the night, downed some caffeine pills, and waited—silently scanning the surroundings through their night-vision equipment, and most importantly, listening intently for the approach of anyone in the dead-still air. It’s so densely vegetated you’d have to be superhuman to get to us without us hearing, Eggers thought.

  The night passed without incident—and without sleep, and at dawn, Ronin got word that Echo-3 was fast en route to Sawtalo Sar’s summit to investigate some suspicious smoldering fires, possibly left by Shah’s men during their movement into the Korangal from the Chowkay after the firefight with Fox-3. The three scout/snipers of Ronin stealt
hily moved out of their hide and vectored up the north ridge to observe and then meet Guyton’s platoon at the summit. With a mission spectrum far broader than targeted hits against individual personnel, Marine scout/ sniper teams are often tasked by commanders to undertake the type of “bounding overwatch” missions that Ronin performed throughout Whalers. Acting as the “eyes forward”—not just watching out for, and then using their precision rifles to interdict, ambushes against other Marine elements on the move, but acting as observers for forward air controllers and mortar and artillery teams—Eggers and Team Ronin combined their knowledge of the area’s terrain with their specialized training to virtually guarantee that units whom they overwatched could safely move through an area. As stealthy, fit, and well trained as they were, however, three men—completely unsupported—stood little chance of survival should an enemy force of greater number descend upon them. Thus, as he had always on such missions, Eggers kept constant watch over his radios—the team’s lifelines of support.

  “Hides,” Pigman noted near the summit of Sawtalo Sar later that morning. “Damn, this is where they probably concealed themselves during the ambush of the SEALs.” Eggers, Roy, and Pigman studied the positions Shah’s men had made—nothing dug in, but rather walled up with large, felled trees, concealing their locations within the surroundings. Topping out on the mountain’s summit at the same time as Ronin, Echo-3 planned to head back down Sawtalo Sar, descending first to Chichal then regaining the north ridge, along which Ronin would ply from the summit downward, providing overwatch as the platoon navigated the steep terrain. They departed around noon.

  Moving quickly yet remaining well concealed, and staying to the west of the Super Highway, Ronin did all they could to stay invisible and keep eyes on Echo-3. But as each man in the team knew all too well, avoiding soft compromise on Sawtalo Sar after traveling the mountain’s slopes for over five days—especially after linking up with an entire platoon at the mountain’s summit—was virtually impossible. And so, a little over an hour into their descent, a lone elderly Afghan man appeared “out of nowhere,” as typically occurred in the region. The trio approached him—he was unarmed, carried no ICOM, and looked unkempt and extremely unhealthy. Pigman immediately locked onto the man’s milky-white eyeballs. Trachoma, the corpsman thought. Eerie as hell. The team attempted to ask him some questions in basic Pashto, but the man, whose clothes were torn and soiled, didn’t cooperate. Following their rules of engagement, they photographed him, then sent him in the opposite direction of their travel.