Victory Point

by Ed Darack

  With the crew chief signaling that all patients had been secured, Henninger expertly lifted the Blackhawk into the sky. As the dust cleared, Eggers could see Roy smiling at him, waving, as if to say, “Have fun on your hike down. I’ll be eating ice cream at an air-conditioned hospital—thinkin’ about you!”

  12

  STAR WARS

  While the Marines of Echo and Golf companies continued to squeeze Shah’s remaining forces into the upper recesses of the Narang, Shuryek, and Korangal valleys, Battalion Command sought to have Fox Company continue their march toward Objective-4 on the sixteenth. But with 19 August looming ever closer, Command realized that the Fox Marines wouldn’t have enough time to egress before the deadline if they moved farther north. So, as of the morning of the sixteenth, Fox-3 and Middendorf’s mortar team would stay put, and First Platoon and the Afghan National Army soldiers would travel back to Hill 2510. Then the call came ordering all of Fox-3 to begin their movement out of the Chowkay beginning on the morning of the seventeenth.

  “Crisp,” Konnie said to the staff sergeant. “I told everyone yesterday to ‘shave away a new day’ . . . yet I see some guys with stubble.” The lieutenant was referencing his order that all the Marines in the platoon shave the day after the firefight. He’d learned about this from an instructor at Infantry Officers’ Course who believed that the simple act of shaving could dramatically change one’s outlook and boost his morale. “‘Get those bristly faces nice and smooth,’ I told them.”

  “Some of these grunts, you know, Lieutenant, they had hairy arm-pits when they were like eleven years old. Shit grows fast, even up here,” Crisp responded. Both knew that, joking aside, the fresh supply of food, water, and ammo, not to mention some rest—and a clean shave—would go a long way toward lifting the spirits of the grunts.

  “So we’re not goin’ any higher, huh?” Konnie asked Grissom, disappointed.

  “As of now, no. We’re headed back. Task Force Devil figures that what took us sixteen hours to climb up will take forty-eight hours to get out of,” the captain explained.

  “Sir, that’s funny to me,” Konnie began, wondering just how much of Shah’s force remained. “I wish we could stay up here for weeks, sir, at least until we get every last of Ahmad Shah’s little—now littler—army.”

  “I’m with you, Lieutenant. Really, I think we should set up a combat outpost right up here, permanently man the place. That’s the only way to do it.”

  “Or just take care of ’em all right now—I mean, I guess we have less than, what, twenty-four hours to do it?”

  “Well, yeah. If they attack again.”

  “Come and get some . . . bitches.” Konnie stretched out his arms and wagged his hands, then slowly spun around and gazed up at all aspects of the high valley, as if he knew that one of Shah’s men had him pegged within the reticle of a high-powered spotting scope.

  As Fox-1 moved south that morning, the platoon’s interpreters picked up ICOM chatter indicating that some of Shah’s men had sighted them and were setting an ambush. As First Platoon surmounted Hill 2510, the radio traffic exploded in volume and intensity. Lieutenant Geise, preparing for a possible maelstrom similar to the one Fox-3 had endured, dispatched some Marines and Afghan soldiers to probe the area to the hill’s south and had the bulk of the platoon assume a strong defensive posture. Shots rang out—signaling a possible massive onslaught—but then the valley fell silent. The ANA had detected a small band of Shah’s men approaching them with AK-47s; the soldiers engaged—and the attackers turned tail and ran.

  The activity throughout the Sawtalo Sar region following the attack on the fourteenth seemed to paint a picture of a fractured force—but as fractured as that picture may have been, it was brushed with strokes of ever-determined fighters. Back at Fox-3’s patrol base, Pigeon worked with two A-10s, trying to utilize their targeting systems to scan the area around their encampment. But the infamously fickle weather of the Hindu Kush proved the undoing of that plan. Mushrooming cumulus dotted the skies above the Chowkay and other valleys on the sixteenth, granting only fleeting windows through which the Warthogs could glimpse the landscape during their day’s mission, preventing them from providing Pigeon with much information.

  Enemy indicators abounded, however, on the ground surrounding Fox-3. Peering through a spotting scope, Konnie noted a bizarre sight that afternoon. “Looks like we got a donkey train—goin’ up that ridge to the east of us,” he said to a lance corporal who was lying next to him. “But no donkey-train tenders. Those guys are loaded down, and on donkey autopilot.” A line of the small, scrawny beasts, each about the size of a large German shepherd, weighed down with boxes slung over their backs with colorful rope, wandered up a trail on the shoulder of Cheshane Tupay. A few hours later, the “convoy” came galloping down, empty. ICOM traffic continued to increase through the sixteenth, but the most telling moments of enemy determination and presence came by foot. Two men, from the village of Jubagay, just to the east of the crest of Cheshane Tupay’s south ridge, strolled to the outskirts of camp early in the afternoon.

  “They are asking that the Marines just leave,” Jimmy translated. “They say that there is no reason for you to be in the valley.”

  “Well, we got six reasons recovering at Bagram,” Konnie immediately shot back. While Jubagay had been one of the villages to which Donnellan, Wood, and Rob Scott had wanted the Marines to venture during Whalers, the time limit wouldn’t allow it. Not knowing the true nature of the village—and who actually lived there—the Marines sent the duo back. But they were replaced by yet another villager claiming to be from Jubagay a few hours later; this time, the village elder.

  “Sir,” Jimmy told Grissom, “the man wants to know who you are; where are you from.”

  “Just tell him that we’re Marines from the United States. We’re here to get rid of any of those who want to bring back the Taliban,” the captain calmly answered, but he was suspicious of the man. The elder left, but long after his departure, Konnie and Grissom learned that he’d asked a number of other probing questions, very specific questions—and had gotten answers, not from any of the Marines, but from the interpreters.

  “You told them what?!” Konnie exploded when he learned that the elder had inquired about the size of the force of Marines at the camp, how much food they had, how much ammunition, what types of supplies landed during the CDS drop, how the Marines had been positioned throughout the camp—and other important tactical details. “Well,” the lieutenant concluded, “we can be sure that they know where we are, and what our capabilities are.” The security breach emphasized the difficulty the Marines faced in Afghanistan. Their COIN campaign required that they work side by side with locals, in part to prove their intentions. But in a corner of the Hindu Kush as remote as the Chowkay, one where many of the locals had never even seen a Westerner, those locals could be easily co-opted by forces such as Shah’s—and used, as had happened that afternoon, as spies. Jubagay represented an extreme example, as the battalion had no record of any coalition forces ever having visited the place, as one of the most remote in all of Afghanistan.

  “We need to move our camp around—not by much—but displace everyone. You can bet that by now, Shah knows exactly where our command post is located,” Konnie seethed. “He probably also knows the position of our machine guns and our perimeter defenses.” Grissom agreed. Konnie made plans to offset the various positions of the platoon’s elements, some by just a few tens of meters, others by a few hundred—Grissom’s only requirement being that the command post be situated such that a radio operator could aim an antenna to get SATCOM. Only the mortar team, which Middendorf and his Marines had emplaced and fire-capped within a small fortress of stout boulders, would stay put.

  At dusk, cloaked by the darkness of the deep valley, Konstant told his Marines about the planned rearrangement, and he and Crisp helped to establish new positions for the grunts. With utmost stealth, and moving quickly, the Marines got the repositioning u
nder way. Konnie located the command post—which he, Grissom, Pigeon, and Middendorf would occupy—about three hundred meters to the southwest of the old post, where Shah, Konnie figured, would have what was left of his men aim their weapons should they attack. With a CDS drop planned for early the next morning, after which Fox Company would begin their descent out of the Chowkay, Grissom, Konnie, and Middendorf all felt that half the Marines should sleep while the other half stood watch, once they’d completed the position shift.

  “Sir, ICOM traffic!” Jimmy the interpreter interrupted the officers’ discussion.

  “Oh, great, Jimmy. More ICOM traffic. Let me guess, there’s nine thousand of them, and they all got flamethrowers,” Konnie sarcastically responded.

  “Listen, Konstant, we need to take every transmission seriously,” Grissom snapped. “What are you hearing, Jimmy?”

  “There are two groups, and they are talking to each other. The man from the first group said, ‘We are all in position, are you there yet?’ And then a voice from the other group said, ‘Yes, we are all here,’ and then the first guy asked, ‘How many men do you have?’ And that man responded that he had forty,” Jimmy summarized.

  “Well, if we’ve heard that they’re massing between forty and sixty guys to come get us, we’ve heard it a million times,” Grissom responded. “But let’s stand to anyway,” the captain finished, ordering that all Marines stand security.

  “And then, Commander Grissom . . .” Jimmy chimed in.

  “What is it, Jimmy?”

  “And then they said one more thing. The commander man said, ‘Good, we’re all set, do everything we talked about—but no more talking on the radio or on the phones.’ And that was it, Commander Grissom. The ICOM talk went dead.”

  “Now that’s somethin’ we don’t hear them do very often. Mouthy motherfuckers always tryin’ to scare us with their ICOM chatter. They never give the order to shut up like that,” Konnie interjected as Konstant, Middendorf, Grissom, and Pigeon stared at one another pensively, each revealing genuine concern over Jimmy’s last bit of intel.

  “Okay. Everybody stay sharp—as usual,” Grissom ordered. “Sounds like somethin’s imminent—real imminent, like within minutes.” The officers spread the word for all the Marines to keep extra focused, on heightened readiness.

  But minutes drifted into hours, and the attack never came. The grunts, scanning the surrounding peaks with their NVGs, found nothing even slightly out of place. No unusual lights, no sounds, nothing. With a big movement on the near horizon, and with the Marines slammed with fatigue from the past days, Grissom okayed the return to 50 percent security, allowing half of the grunts to get some much-needed sleep. Jimmy’s translated message had caused just another false alarm; in the silence of the dark, cloud-raked night, Konnie, Middendorf, and Pigeon slipped into an almost comalike sleep—along with half of the other Marines of the element—for the first truly rejuvenating rest they’d had in days.

  “Lieutenant! Lieutenant! LIEUTENANT!” Staff Sergeant Crisp roared, shaking Konnie, who was sleeping on the dirt wearing just a T-shirt, underwear, and his laced-up boots. “Lieutenant Konstant! How you sleepin’ through this! How the fuck you sleepin’ through this?!” Konnie woke up to Crisp slamming his shoulders against the dirt, the staff sergeant’s face and Kevlar helmet flashing white, yellow, and red.

  “Wha—” The disoriented Konstant opened his eyes, clutching at the dirt below him as the most coordinated, most intense of Shah’s attacks yet pummeled the encampment.

  “Man, get yo’ crazy ass the fuck up—sir!”

  Konstant awoke to the hisses of incoming RPGs, the earsplitting booms of exploding 82 mm mortars, and the greenish white streaks of PK machine-gun tracer rounds cracking and whizzing above Crisp’s head. He grabbed his M16 and dashed for cover. Boom! A mortar connected with a large log next to which Konnie and Middendorf had been sleeping, obliterating it and blowing Pigeon and Dorf—both fully geared up—fifteen feet down the steep hillside.

  The lieutenant clawed his way to the top of an embankment to get eyes on the attackers’ positions. Rounds were pinging off rocks around him and punching into the dirt just feet in front of him; he could hear the distinctive fizzle of glowing tracer rounds’ burning pyro—and smell the combusting material’s stinging odor. The tracers converged on the camp from a semicircle of positions emplaced on the surrounding mountains, their streaks appearing like spokes on a wheel. Then the RPG storm began; from three different positions, over ten rocket-propelled grenades tore onto the old command post, the crude ballistic weapons seemingly in a competition with the raining mortars to completely obliterate the position. Had they not shifted locations just hours earlier, Grissom, Pigeon, Middendorf, and Konnie would undoubtedly have been killed. Completely pinned down, and with only the one magazine already in his M16’s well, Konnie could only unload thirty rounds into the machine-gun position, and that machine-gun position was a long way off, far outside the max-effective range of his M16.

  Middendorf, blown awake by the mortar blast just meters from him, immediately linked up with Grissom and Pigeon, and put a call to Corporal Daniel Shelton, his on-site “fire direction center,” who would ensure that the targeting data the lieutenant passed to him got relayed accurately to the individual gun operators. Middendorf, however, relied on his PRR—Personal Role Radio—a standard two-way comm set used to communicate with others in close proximity—to speak with the gun team. But in the covered position that he, Grissom, and Pigeon had taken, Dorf couldn’t get the required line of sight with Shelton’s PRR. Having studied the terrain over the past day while he developed his fire-support plan—anticipating the most likely locations from which Shah’s force would attack—Middendorf already knew the exact spot he needed to hit. He just had to give Shelton a four-digit number, referencing an already-plotted grid, and within seconds, the very worst of the incoming fire would cease—violently cease. But he couldn’t establish comms with Shelton; so the tubes stood silent. As the seconds ticked away, the barrage grew even worse, with mortar rounds now “walking” onto the new command post’s position and RPGs crashing down throughout the grunts’ camp. As Pigeon worked furiously to get air on station, Dorf repeated in his head that the only way to avert certain disaster was to get mortar rounds downrange. “I’m leaving,” the lieutenant said as he slapped Grissom on his rear SAPI.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” the captain shot back. Rounds peppered the dirt around their covered position; the Marines choked on a low-hanging fog of dust and vapor from detonated explosives and burned cordite. The RPGs and machine-gun fire kept coming—and coming, ever more accurate. The professionalism of the attackers struck Middendorf; he couldn’t believe they could hit their marks from such distances. He had to get his mortars on target. The lieutenant jumped over the small berm before him and sprinted up the terrain. “What the fuck, Middendorf? You’re gonna get yourself KILLED!” Grissom howled.

  “You, too? You crazy, too, like Lieutenant Konstant?” Crisp shouted as he unleashed bursts from his M16. “You been drinkin’ out of the same—the same whateva-tha-fuck—water hole as Konstant!”

  Married since 2002—and looking to have kids so that maybe one day he too could talk his son into joining the Marine Corps after graduating West Point—Middendorf thought of his wife and then said good-bye forever to her in his head as he tore a path toward Shelton under the press of copper-jacketed lead hurling through the Afghan night at supersonic speeds, shock waves slapping his eardrums with loud cracks! Eyes on, he thought, after seventy-five meters, eyes on the tubes, then dove flat onto the ground and pressed the microphone to his dirt-encrusted mouth. “Corporal Shelton!”

  “Copy!” came Shelton’s response.

  “Fire Alpha Oscar 3303! Fire Alpha Oscar 3303!” The lieutenant commanded his Marines to unleash what he’d planned to be a crushing barrage from all tubes simultaneously at the target, three times total.

  “Roger.” Each of the four gun teams adjusted the eleva
tion and deflection of their mortar tube, snapped a C-shaped charge onto the neck of a round just above its fins, then dropped it into the tube. Thunk- thunk-thunk-thunk followed by a stentorian crack! crack! crack! crack! Four 81 mm mortar rounds accelerated away from the team’s position at hundreds of meters per second, hurling in unison toward their apogees, then sailed down toward the same mark. But before the parabolic arcs of those first rounds had crested, the team had four more en route—then four more after that. Whump whump whump whump! Seconds later, Alpha Oscar 3303 erupted in a mass of concussive fireballs, the mortars completely laying waste to the enemy position.

  But more of those positions remained, and the mortar team’s barrage left them with just seven 81 mm rounds. Not knowing if Pigeon had aircraft inbound—and conscious of the necessity of deconflicting his mortar fire with flight paths—Middendorf again tore across the open field of fire to get line of sight with Grissom and Pigeon. A quick back-and-forth revealed that airpower hadn’t yet arrived. But then another of Shah’s positions opened up—more mortars, RPGs, and machine-gun fire rained down, loosed by roughly fifteen extremists. Middendorf dove back toward his team. But the new enemy position wasn’t one on the list of the lieutenant’s predesignated grids.