Victory Point (24 page)

Luttrell had used his corpsman training and first-aid kit to treat his own wounds, but still required extensive medical attention; with deep-tissue injury and unknown amounts of shrapnel lodged in his body, every minute counted—most people would have been long dead by this point. Gulab, who made his living primarily as a goat herder, but was also a farmer and woodcutter, knew that whoever had assailed the American would very likely continue to hunt for him in Salar Ban, and pledged to stick by Luttrell’s side until rescuers arrived, providing anything within his means to help him survive.

Luttrell pulled out a three-by-five inch all-weather “Rite in the Rain” notepad and scratched a quick message, then tore off the green page and handed it to Gulab, asking him to take it to the Americans at Asadabad, an easy (for a local) jaunt down the Pech Road. But Gulab refused to leave Luttrell’s side; instead he called on the service of a distant relative, an older man named Shina, who dwelled in another part of Salar Ban. Gulab instructed Shina to go not to Asadabad, but directly to Commander Matt at the American base at Nangalam, a longer, more grueling journey to the opposite end of the Pech Valley from Asadabad. Gulab and others from the Shuryek, having endured decades of brutality at the hands of outside forces, viewed the American military at Asadabad with suspicion, having had just a few experiences with them. Shina, hesitant even to leave the Shuryek, much less make the arduous trek to the Marine base at Nangalam, finally acquiesced to the pleas of Gulab, who even paid his elder relative a thousand afghanis (about twenty U.S. dollars) to make the trip to see Bartels. And so on the night of the twenty-ninth, the lone Afghan, carrying the small piece of green paper in one of his pockets, journeyed down the meandering trails of the Shuryek Valley into Matin, where he hired a cab to drive him along the Pech Road to Nangalam.

“Commander Matt! Commander Matt!” Sultan ran into the COC at Blessing around midnight. “There is a man at the gate saying that there is a dying American! In Salar Ban! He wants to talk with you! He is very scared of the Americans, but he wants to see just you, and not anyone from Asadabad. For him to come in the middle of the night is pretty crazy around here.”

Matt, unaware of the SOF tragedy that had unfolded just a few miles from Blessing, sprinted to the camp’s entrance, where he met the gray-bearded Shina. “Sultan, make some tea, and get this guy a blueberry muffin or something. He looks tired.”

“Yessir,” Sultan gruffed. Matt led Shina into what Bartels knew of as the “tearoom,” where he took all camp guests to converse about a range of topics, from a family member’s medical needs to the location of an ACM weapons cache. Sultan bounded through the door just as Matt and Shina sat down on red-and-yellow floor mats, with the lieutenant pouring tea and handing Shina one of the chow hall’s blueberry muffins. The initial meeting lasted just minutes, Matt learning through Sultan that an American “doctor” was hiding in Gulab’s home, somewhere in Salar Ban.

“An American doctor?” Bartels shot a puzzled look to Sultan.

“Yes, and he says that he is shot, bleeding a lot. Dirt all over his face. Very bad condition. He is a doctor who is doing work on
himself
!” Bartels immediately realized that the survivor must have been a Navy Corpsman—possibly connected to the search Kinser was awaiting orders to undertake from his patrol base at Kandagal, many miles and thousands of feet of elevation gain from Salar Ban, but still closer than any other American troops in the region. Shina then remembered the note. He handed the folded green paper to Matt.

“I can barely read this . . . what is this?
It isn’t even legible,
” the lieutenant muttered to himself. After a few moments, Bartels managed to decipher the glib message scratched in black ink:

Below
signed,
he read the name Marcus and then struggled with what he thought spelled “Little” or “Lateral.”
Is this some sort of a hoax? Is someone trying to lure us up the Shuryek?
the lieutenant wondered. Bartels, intimately familiar with U.S. military protocol for “blood chits,” knew that all units, conventional or SOF, mandated the inclusion of some uniquely identifying personal information, such as mother’s maiden name, name of a first pet, name of a high school, etc., in order to confirm the identity of personnel in duress; the lieutenant even looked for some hidden message, but couldn’t decipher anything. Still, he sprinted to the COC with the note, where he immediately scanned it, then sent it by SIPR (secure e-mail, pronounced “sipper”) to Rob Scott and Tom Wood, and then called the OpsO.

“What’s the note say, Bartels?” Tom barked.

“I just e-mailed it to you, sir. You should have it now. But it’s a real short type of blood chit.” Matt read the message to Wood. “If it’s real, somebody’s in really, really bad shape. I mean, this is barely legible—like its written by someone gasping their last breaths.”

“Is there a name on it?” Wood asked.

“Marcus something . . . maybe Marcus
Little
or Marcus
Lateral
. I can’t read the last name.”

“Hold on.” The OpsO, now at Asadabad with a contingent of SEALs under the command of an O-6-level SEAL (a Navy captain, a full-colonel equivalent in the Marine Corps—one rank higher than MacMannis) in Bagram, made a quick inquiry. “Marcus
Luttrell
?” Wood asked the lieutenant.

“Yeah. Yeah! I can just barely see it spelled that way.”

“Okay, Bartels. Make sure that that walk-in doesn’t fuckin’ walk
out
. And hold on; someone at Bagram, a SEAL captain, wants to talk to you. He’ll be calling any second now.” The SEAL asked Matt a litany of questions. Bartels could only tell him the few facts that he had before him, and quickly sensed that the captain didn’t believe a word he said.

“Well, sir. We have this note, and we have the walk-in who has seen one American in the village of Salar Ban—that’s all I can say.” The SEAL ended the conversation, then Matt returned to the tearoom with Sultan and Shina. Back at Asadabad, a line of SEALs, clutching their M4s, launched a verbal attack against Wood, demanding to gain access to Shina and get a grid on Gulab’s house in order to launch what Wood sensed the SEALs planned to be a direct-action raid/hostage rescue mission.

“Look, this is just a friendly local somewhere, helping one of your guys. Hopefully there are more survivors that other villagers are helping, too—”

“As far as I’m concerned, your career as a Marine is over. Fuckin’ over. Gone. You’ll be out of theater in less than twenty-four hours!” the SEALs spat at the shocked OpsO.

“We have a Marine patrol literally one valley over from Salar Ban, in the Korangal. They can push into the village within two or three hours, get your guy outta there—have him within six hours, possibly, if we can identify the exact location of the house. Maybe have him within two or three hours, but we need to determine the
exact location
of the house first,” Wood stated, flanked by the Marines who faced down the SEALs along with him.

“Marines won’t have anything to do with this. This is a SEAL mission. We’re gonna get our men outta there! Give us the walk-in. You don’t gimme the walk-in and I’ll—”

“He’s with First Lieutenant Matthew Bartels, at the base he commands—Camp Blessing—at Nangalam,”Wood stated, then stormed out of the “meeting.”

 

 

 

Shina stayed with Matt and Sultan through the daylight hours of the thirtieth, during which time the lieutenant and his terp worked with the elderly Afghan to pinpoint the exact location of Gulab’s home on a map. Salar Ban, like most villages in the Kunar, sprawls across a huge expanse of rugged terrain; even a large American force would need to spend upward of a week to locate Luttrell if a search-and-rescue operation required comprehensively sweeping individual houses (many of which blend into the mountainous surroundings so well that outsiders can stare directly at them from just thirty feet away without noticing a “house” at all). The Afghan, who knew his land intimately, knew
just
his land—and not a graphical representation of it, like a map. He couldn’t even give directions; he just had to
physically show
Bartels or Sultan—or a SEAL rescue team—himself.

“What if we took him up in a helicopter?” Matt asked Sultan.

“No way, his eyes have never seen the landscape around him without his feet planted firmly on that land, just like a large piece of paper printed with squiggly lines showing the terrain around his home means nothing to him. He needs to kick his own steps up those trails he’s walked for decades, with any outsiders who want to know the secrets of the villager’s mountainous world paying good attention as they follow closely behind him.”

Bartels and Sultan quickly established a rapport with Shina, who, despite the drama of their introduction, now saw the two as friends, and extended an invitation to the duo to come to his home in Salar Ban. On the evening of 30 June, Bartels, now partially briefed on the SOF disaster, received another heated call from the SEAL captain in Bagram, who demanded that Bartels disclose the location of Gulab’s house.

“I don’t know, sir. But as you know, the guy who can take a rescue team to him is sitting here at my base.”

“Get him to point it out on a map!” the SEAL thundered.

“Been trying all day. He doesn’t even know what a map is, sir,” Bartels explained. “He can’t even vaguely describe where the house is, sir. He just has to walk there himself, and show someone firsthand.”

“What if we get him in the air? He can point out the location to a team from the air, right?”

“No. He’s not used to seeing the world from the air, just from the trails he’s walked his whole life,” Bartels replied.

“Keep him there. Don’t let him move. Absolutely don’t let your eyes off him!” The SEAL captain then tersely ended the conversation.

Later that evening, a helicopter swooped onto Blessing’s landing strip, carrying two unidentified, bearded SOF personnel who charged into the tearoom, demanding, “That him?” as they pointed to Shina. Matt nodded, then the duo threw a black bag over Shina’s head, tightly flexicuffed the villager’s hands behind his back, and dragged him into the helicopter, which then roared into the night. Bartels and Sultan shot each other stunned looks.

“I guess that’s why he didn’t want to go to Asadabad,” Matt said with a tone of disbelief and embarrassment, astonished that fellow American military servicemen would treat a local clearly trying to help with such unnecessary brutality.

“Too bad we couldn’t keep Asadabad from coming to him, sir,” Sultan replied.

 

 

 

Earlier on the twenty-ninth, as Shina journeyed to Camp Blessing, Ahmad Shah and his men descended upon Salar Ban. They’d seen a total of four Americans during their ambush, but counted only three bodies in the aftermath of the attack, and knew the only possible egress route off that part of the mountain struck through Salar Ban. Capturing a survivor, whom the terrorist could use in a videotaped beheading spectacle, would make Shah’s cavalcade of death and destruction complete. Through intimidation of villagers in Salar Ban, Shah learned of Gulab and the injured American he harbored, and immediately came to the shepherd’s door. But the reserved Gulab refused to turn over the SEAL. Had Luttrell descended into Chichal or any other of the Korangal Valley’s villages, he would almost assuredly have been handed over to the terrorist. But the SEAL had made his way from the heights of Sawtalo Sar onto the mountain’s Shuryek Valley flank, and Shah had just a few men in his band; violence against Gulab almost certainly would incite the entire village of Salar Ban to take up arms against the wannabe Taliban commander, and Shah knew it. After threatening the lives of Gulab and his family, Shah departed, having come just feet from Luttrell; only an earthen wall separated the two.

 

 

 

As the SEALs interrogated Shina at their COC in Asadabad—and Luttrell continued to cling to life—the Task Force Red Rangers finalized their plan to move onto Sawtalo Sar to recover those in the downed Chinook and locate the survivors of the SDVT SEAL recon team. With air unavailable for inserts throughout the area in the wake of the MH-47 shoot-down, the soldiers drafted a plan where they would move onto the objective area by foot, starting from a point west of Camp Wright along the road connecting Jalalabad with Asadabad. Rob and Tom scrutinized the Rangers’ plans. The soldiers had done a “route recon” assessment of their intended movement onto Sawtalo Sar using 1:50,000-scale map sheets of the region, and determined that they could reach the crash site, roughly ten miles in a straight line from their starting point, within twelve hours; thus, they planned to have individual Rangers carry less than one full day’s worth of food and water, keeping light to move fast, with the intention of resupplying via CDS drops [Containerized Delivery System—pallets of food, water, and other supplies dropped from the rear of high-flying C-130s] once at the crash site.

With raised eyebrows, the two Marines openly questioned what they felt to be an unrealistically low approximation of the time the Rangers would need to traverse the incredibly steep and rugged terrain, particularly when factoring in the temperatures the area experienced at the height of summer. “These guys are used to short, helicopter-inserted hard-hit ops, which they’re great at,” Rob Scott explained to a representative at SOCCENT. “But as far as we have seen, they haven’t done many—if
any
—long-distance movements through the mountains out here. Their plan just isn’t realistic.” But the advice of the Marines—to man-pack at least seventy-two hours’ worth of food and water and to take a closer look at the densely packed contour lines on the section of the map representing the ground they would follow—fell on deaf ears. Commanders in Tampa, Florida, approved the mission, and approximately one hundred special operations soldiers, including members of Task Force Red Rangers and various ODAs, embarked on their journey.