by Ed Darack
Unknown to Middendorf, Corporal Joshua Plunk, working in an uncovered position with rounds splitting through the air around him, already had the group of fifteen in the crosshairs of gun number four’s sight. Carefully adjusting the deflection for a “direct lay” mortar attack by keeping the crosshairs squarely on the group as he leveled the gun, the corporal then grabbed the mortar team’s “Vector” laser rangefinder. 1,775, the red digital readout flashed after Plunk depressed a small button on the top of the precision optic. Plunk laughed at the irony of the range—the year the Marine Corps was born—and pulled out his “whiz wheel,” a circular plastic “mechanical computer” used to determine gun elevation and round charge based on a target’s range. As Shah’s men belched out machine-gun and mortar fire from their position, Plunk grasped one of the team’s last rounds and hung it over the flared mouth of the gun, then with a flick of his wrist, sank the mortar into the guts of the tube. Crack! Then he sank another. Crack! Seconds later, as Plunk pressed his head into the coarse ground to keep well below the enemy’s low-flying rounds, his two mortars plowed into the mountain. Whump! Whump! The last of the tracers from the position fizzled into the night as Plunk’s two rounds impacted dead on target.
With the mortar team’s four-gun barrage and Plunk’s direct lay onto the fifteen-man position, the Marines gained decisive control of the battle, shredding the two most concentrated of Shah’s strongholds. With those machine guns pinning Konnie down now silenced, the lieutenant grabbed his flak, Kevlar helmet, and ten more magazines of rounds, and Pigeon continued to work to get close air support on station.
But still, some of Shah’s men remained. At the Marines’ most lonely position in the Chowkay that night, an observation post stood up on some high ground to the west of the main force, seven Marines—two snipers and members of the platoon’s Second Squad, led by Corporal Chris Smith—had been on the receiving end of an intense barrage of machine-gun and RPG fire from a position just over two hundred meters away. Taking well-aimed shots at the attackers’ muzzle flashes in the night, Lance Corporal Mark Perna heard so many rounds impacting throughout the small position—but without the enemy scoring any hits—that he likened the moment to running through a summer thunderstorm yet emerging completely dry. While the small group immediately returned fire, the enemy shot from stoutly dug-in positions, and their fire seemed to focus ever more tightly and intensely with each passing second. Just as Shah’s force seemed to be on the cusp of achieving one victory in the night’s battle—with screaming RPGs exploding around the seven Marines and machine-gun rounds peppering their hillside—Lance Corporal Ernest Padilla grabbed an AT4 rocket, loaded with an HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) warhead, and steadied it on his shoulders, released its safety levers, and cocked its firing pin. As another volley of RPGs swooshed toward the Marines, Padilla shouted, “Is the backblast clear?” to make sure that none of the other Marines stood within the cone of superheated gasses about to roar out of the tail end of the launch tube.
“You’re good!” a Marine yelled. Lining up the aiming sights on the bright flashes of enemy fire before him, Padilla squeezed the trigger. Click—Boom! Reddish-orange fireballs popped out of both ends of the launcher. Padilla tossed the spent tube as the warhead accelerated toward the insurgents—then struck their position, dead-on. The grunts continued firing, then the enemy fell completely silent.
“This is Fox-1, I think everyone in Fox-3 is dead—the entire platoon!” On Hill 2510, Geise pondered how he’d make the call to battalion higher as he watched the attack that night unfurl before his eyes. There’s no way they can survive that, he thought. It looks like a scene from Star Wars, with all those green and red tracers and exploding balls of yellow flame. Then a small number of Shah’s men attacked Hill 2510. Geise directed his Marines to return fire—and as happened a few hours earlier, the aggressors turned and ran. Fox-1 would continue to hold firm as Star Wars raged on.
“Come on, Konnie, now’s not the time,” Middendorf began as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, assuming that Konstant had run to his position—which was still taking sporadic fire—to bum a Marlboro.
“No. I’m not here for a smoke,” Konnie responded as Dorf tried not to laugh at him. Konstant was wearing just his flak, Kevlar helmet, boots, and underwear—no pants. “Pigeon needs us to work up targeting grids. He’s got air on the way. But they need ten-digit grids for a JDAM drop.”
“What’s with your hand, Konnie?” Middendorf asked. Blood, from a shrapnel gash, was oozing from the top of Konstant’s right hand. “Guess your luck ran out tonight.” Middendorf laughed.
Konnie looked at his watch—a minute past midnight on the seventeenth of August. “Hey, I just realized that it’s my birthday. I just turned twenty-four this minute.”
“What a birthday party you have here,” Middendorf observed drily, then jumped into the job of finding targets for Pigeon. But a ten-digit grid, required for Pigeon to clear a JDAM GPS-guided bomb drop, was far too small a plot of land—one square meter—to resolve on Middendorf’s map. He and Konnie, doing a quick map recon, determined the most likely routes of egress for whatever of Shah’s force had survived. But the highest resolution Middendorf could discern was an area represented by an eight-digit grid (ten meters by ten meters). So he just added a zero to the northing and a zero to the easting, then passed the now-ten-digit grid to the FAC.
Cruising at over thirty-five thousand feet, a B-52H Stratofortress of the Air Force’s Fifth Bomb Wing based out of Minot Air Base in North Dakota, tracked toward the Hindu Kush and the Chowkay Valley, packed with two-thousand-pound GBU-31 JDAMs. With the survivors of Shah’s force now on the run, Pigeon worked up a final attack plan for the bomber, based on the grids identified by Middendorf and Konstant, as Grissom, Konnie, and Middendorf looked on.
“What’s takin’ so long, Pigeon?” Konnie asked.
“A B-52 doesn’t turn on a dime, Lieutenant,” the FAC shot back. “Not like those A-10s that can just fly around in tight circles all day long inside the valley.” With direct comms established with the B-52, Pigeon began to pass a nine-line brief to the bomber. Their detailed instructions received, the pilots began to position their massive craft for the attack, taking them out of range of Pigeon’s radio. Waiting for a read-back, a confirmation that the aircraft had received all information in the nine-line correctly, Pigeon, realizing that the B-52 couldn’t hear his transmissions, jumped on SATCOM to Rob Scott. “Comms are down between me and the B-52,” he told the XO. With the huge bomber carving a broad turn into its final attack heading, Rob, in yet another example of his acting as the glue to keep the battalion’s operations moving forward, immediately contacted the Air Force’s ASOC, or Air Support Operations Center, in Bagram, which contacted the B-52. With a tenuous connection established, Rashman once again stepped up to the plate—using Pigeon’s coordinates, Zach got a read-back sent to Rob Scott and Ratkowiak and gave the cleared-hot call down the channel. As clouds began to roll in over the valley, the bomber released one GBU-31, its destination grid having been programmed into its guidance system by the bomber’s crew. As the B-52 then turned off its attack run, Pigeon prepared to call in a second strike as the bomb’s fins clacked back and forth, deflecting at computer-adjusted intervals, sending the huge munition inside an invisible cone of ingress with the tip of that trajectory field pricking the one-square-meter patch of earth Middendorf and Konnie reckoned to be where the last of Shah’s men would most likely be grouping. Just over forty seconds after the B-52’s crew released the bomb, night flashed to dawn and the JDAM erupted in a blinding fireball on the ridge to the north of the platoon.
“What about the second grid, Pigeon?” Konnie asked excitedly as Marines in the distance cheered at the billowing fireball, followed seconds later by the rumbling whump! of the distant impact. “Let’s finish ’em off.”
“I’m Rolexing TOTs, Konnie. With the comms the way they are, things are taking more time than normal,”
Pigeon explained to the lieutenant—in aviator lingo—that he had to push back the time on target for the second JDAM.
“Come on, Pigeon,” Konnie goaded. “Smoke check—”
“Okay, Konstant. Shut the fuck up!” Grissom began. “And why don’t you go and put some fucking pants on, Lieutenant. You look absolutely ridiculous standing there. A real model officer, aren’t you? And what’s with your hand?”
“RPG, sir. Hit by shrapnel,” Konnie explained as he exhaled a long banner of cigarette smoke.
“Great. We were almost able to say that we got in that huge contact with the enemy and got out of it completely unscathed. But you had to go and get hit by RPG shrapnel—the only one of all the Marines out here tonight to get injured.”
“But it’s my birthday, Captain,” Konnie said, oozing sarcasm, before leaving to don his proper uniform.
“Cleared-hot,” Rashman called, working with Pigeon, the pilots, Rob Scott, and the ASOC after he received the read-back.
“Roger, bomb on target within the minute,” Rob Scott passed to Pigeon. After the night’s second “rumbling sunrise,” this time over a ridge to the northeast of the camp, the valley fell silent.
“Think we got ’em all, sir?” Konnie asked Grissom.
“We’ll know soon enough.”
13
KINETIC EXFIL
Up to sixty enemy killed in action over the past three days out of a force of eighty to one hundred—BREAK—enemy command and control now virtually nonexistent—BREAK—” Kelly Grissom earnestly listened to Rob Scott’s intel dump early in the morning of 17 August, the XO’s breaks giving him time to transcribe the information gleaned from numerous HUMINT and SIGINT sources. “Demeanor of survivors extremely hostile—BREAK—small bands of survivors staging to ambush coalition forces in both the Chowkay and Korangal valleys and possibly along the Jalalabad-Asadabad road—BREAK—these bands are possibly on suicide missions—BREAK—Ahmad Shah severely wounded—BREAK—possibly shot or possibly hit from shrapnel—BREAK—escaped to Pakistan and now seeking medical care.” The second-to-last line in the transmission put a grin on Grissom’s face. The insurgent leader, gravely wounded during the fighting, had been “medevaced” by way of his men carrying him on their backs and then on the backs of donkeys, down from Cheshane Tupay, out to the Kunar Valley on the ridges between the Chowkay and Narang Valleys at night—then stashed away in a car’s trunk driven into the Peshawar region of Pakistan. ⅔ had crushed the force that had posed the greatest threat to the region’s upcoming elections—the small army that had brought tragedy to the SEAL recon team and their rescuers, and caused untold chaos and destruction throughout the region.
But, as Rob Scott summarized that morning to Grissom, small pockets of Shah’s paid force lived on, and sought to inflict as much destruction on ⅔ as possible—through ambushes, possibly suicidal in nature. Shah had ordered his remaining men to fight to the death in a sort of ad hoc jihad, to engage the Marines wherever they could as ⅔ egressed from the high valleys surrounding Sawtalo Sar.
Fox-3 prepared to break camp well before dusk on the seventeenth of August in anticipation of a final CDS resupply drop and a strong push to move back to Amrey village. Once at Amrey, Whiskey Company’s Humvees would transport them to the mouth of the Chowkay, where they’d head back to their forward operating base at Mehtar Lam. Having gotten no sleep after the Star Wars firefight, the Marines just wanted to get moving that morning—the sooner they made headway down the valley, the sooner they’d finally get some sleep.
“Work your magic again, Pigeon,” Konnie said as he heard the first wavering drone of an approaching C-130. “We can’t be wasting time and energy chasing all over the place for off-target CDS drops.”
Using the technique he’d devised a couple of days earlier, the FAC controlled the C-130 for the resupply drop just as he’d control an A-10 dropping a laser-guided bomb—he’d make the drop call, and instead of having all containers dropped at once, he’d have the Hercules crew make a number of runs, “clearing-hot” just one package during each pass. Once again, Konnie and the other Marines of Fox-3 stood in awe of the Hornet aviator’s almost uncanny ability to integrate air platforms with the ground element—be those air-assets attack aircraft dropping deadly munitions on enemy targets or cargo birds delivering much-needed supplies to friendly positions.
But while their supply problem of just a few days prior had been scarcity, after the big parachuted containers swooshed into the drop zone that morning, the Fox-3 Marines realized that they’d been resupplied with enough food, water, and ammunition to last them another full week. And since speed ranked as the highest priority at that point in Whalers, portaging all those additional supplies would only serve to slow the already-beleaguered Marines, further exposing them to the few of Shah’s determined men who remained. “We should just take what we need, and then have the engineers blow this stuff,” Grissom thought out loud. But after conferring with the engineers, who told him that they didn’t have enough demo to blow the overflow items to a point at which they’d be worthless to the enemy, the captain gave the command to spread-load the gear—days-upon-days’ worth of food and machine-gun rounds.
But the mortar rounds would see a different fate. As Fox-3 worked to distribute the overload items, distant explosions rang out. Lieutenant Geise contacted Grissom: “Sir, they’re trying to adjust fires to your position, but they’re off by eight hundred meters!” Middendorf immediately had his team prep the gun tubes for a powerful barrage—using the excess mortars just delivered by the Hercules.
“Commander Grissom! Commander Grissom!” Jimmy the terp sprinted toward the captain. “They’re shooting at us!”
“Thanks, Jimmy, but I don’t need you to interpret explosions for me—just Pashto.”
“No, sir. Yes—” the flustered Jimmy began. “I know that you can hear the booms, but I am hearing them talk about trying to find you, they can’t see where we are at.”
“Hold tight, Jimmy. We’re in the process of taking care of these guys right now.” Within minutes, Middendorf’s four 81s stood as a canted phalanx, ready to unleash the just-delivered high-explosive rounds. With known enemy positions already plotted, Middendorf first had his gun teams send volleys at those targets farthest south, where the enemy could possibly get direct eyes on Fox-3’s position.
“Sir,” Jimmy interjected, grabbing Grissom’s attention. “They are now saying that they see the explosions from the Americans—and that they are nowhere near where they are sitting!”
“Hit the northern targets, Dorf.” Grissom passed to Middendorf what amounted to the enemy’s own fire adjustments—on themselves. The gun team realigned their tubes and within seconds had rounds directly on target; Middendorf then ordered a fire for effect, catapulting rock, earth, and Shah’s men skyward.
“What are they sayin’ now, Jimmy?” Grissom asked with a sarcastic smile.
“Nothing—nothing at all, actually.” Jimmy gave the captain a stunned look. After a few minutes, the terp finally had some news: “Sir, others are saying that you just killed all of them and destroyed their mortars. They’re very mad at you and the Marines for this.” Grissom laughed. “Now they really, really want to kill you all for this.”
The captain just shook his head. With yet more of Shah’s remnants obliterated, Middendorf had his team pack up the gun tubes and then the grunts pushed south, linking up with First Platoon and the Afghan soldiers at Hill 2510. Grissom now faced a tough decision: push south by heading into the depths of the valley—their route up the Chowkay—or take the more tactical, but more difficult-to-traverse route on the high ground of the western wall of the valley. Weighing expediency and ease of terrain against the remaining enemy’s determination, Grissom had only one choice—run the high ground, despite it challenges. After a brief rest on the southern shoulder of Hill 2510, Fox-3, Fox-1, the mortar team, and the Afghan soldiers began the trek southward.
“You’ve been using ICOM scanners!
Monitoring enemy transmissions! That’s SIGINT! You’re not authorized to do SIGINT work! We have specially trained teams for that. You need to have those scanners turned off—turned off right now!” came the voice from one of CJTF- 76’s senior intel officers at Bagram, roaring at Rob Scott for ⅔’s use of ICOMs in adjusting fires on the morning of the seventeenth. “You’ll be interfering with sensitive SIGINT work we already have under way!”
“Those ICOM scanners have saved countless lives at this point—just in Whalers alone,” the XO responded.
“Turn those ICOMs off. Turn them off now!” the irate officer blared—as Jimmy continued to feed translated intercepted ICOM traffic to Grissom.
“Commander Grissom! More ICOM traffic.” Jimmy grabbed the captain’s attention once again that morning. “They’re hurting bad, and still want to kill you—but they can’t find you!” The ICOM use confirmed that taking the high ground had kept the Marines and Afghan soldiers out of the gunsights of the last of Shah’s men. Jimmy’s information also indicated to the captain that they might not have been detected because Shah—if he were even still alive—simply had so few remaining troops under him.
Back at JAF: “I’m not turning those ICOMs off. I’d be crazy to do that. They’re saving lives as we speak! I don’t care how it’s seen by higher command—anyone—if we have something that’s keeping our Marines functioning—keeping them safe and alive—they’re gonna keep using it. Period.” The line went dead. Rob Scott never heard another word from the intel officer.
As it had during their march up, the Chowkay’s terrain proved to be a near killer—even more so on the Marines’ egress, as they’d chosen a route that traversed ground that was severely lacking in trails and brought them along the edges of dangerously steep, often vertical rock faces. At times, their movement bordered on rock climbing. Sensing the hesitation of the Marines, Crisp continued to prove himself a moving orator in the heights, ensuring that the line of grunts progressed southward at an even clip. “Osama bin Laden himself gonna be out here soon and git yo’ asses, y’all movin’ so slow!”
