Victory Point (28 page)

“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—
conventional
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.

“We’re gonna squeeze him out—slowly, and force him into contact right where we want him,” Wood began his brief of
Whalers
to Donnellan. The OpsO swept his hands over a map of the Sawtalo Sar region, up the throats of the valleys that radiated about the peak like gnarled pinwheel blades. “We know from intel that his egress route will likely be here, down the Chowkay Valley, or possibly the Narang.” Wood paused for a moment. “So we insert troops simultaneously into the Korangal and the Shuryek, pushing Shah and his men south toward either the Narang or the Chowkay as our guys march up the valleys. Twelve hours after the first Marines head into the Korangal and Shuryek, we insert troops up into the Narang, blocking his route there; and twelve hours after that, we send grunts up the Chowkay, and literally force him into a fight somewhere in the high Korangal, where he’s completely surrounded on all sides.”

“When was the last time American troops went up the Chowkay?” Donnellan asked.

“To my knowledge—” The OpsO abruptly stopped. “I don’t know of
any
patrols or missions into the Chowkay,” Wood continued to ponder. “But that doesn’t mean we haven’t made forays up there, at some time, that I just don’t know about.”

“As we develop the specifics of this operation, we’ll need to send a patrol up there, to probe the valley, to see how the locals react—maybe even harvest some intel.” Donnellan believed that a mission not so much of reconnaissance but of “feeling out” the valley, although risky, was necessary.

On the evening of 30 July, with the battalion leadership’s eyes focused on the second week of August as the kickoff for
Whalers,
First Lieutenant Jesse “Chiz” Chizmadia, commander of Whiskey Company’s First Platoon, ventured into the Chowkay with sixteen of his Marines along with an equal-size force from Whiskey-3. Anxious and unsure about what they’d find, or even if other outside forces had gone into the Chowkay since the start of the war, Jesse knew that the Soviets had tried to penetrate deep into the chasm that Alexander the Great had passed by during his march up the Kunar Valley. He’d also heard the reports of those Soviets—entire armored columns, in fact—who were never seen or heard from again, earning the Chowkay the name “Valley of Death.”

Narrow, dizzyingly steep in places, and violently washed out along much of its route, the road into the Chowkay made the worst of the Pech Road seem like a superhighway. Slowly edging up the road, which was etched onto the face of a cliff with a four-hundred-foot sheer drop, the Marines finally reached a point through which their Humvees could no longer pass. Jesse and his Marines dismounted and continued on foot. After two and a half days, they’d seen no sign of enemy activity, or that of any outsider, at least since the Soviets. They returned to JAF with stories and photographs and reported that the locals seemed friendly, even offering watermelon at one village.

With Chizmadia’s mission successfully completed, the battalion finalized
Whalers’
specifics. On the night of 7 August, platoons of Echo Company would simultaneously enter the Korangal and Shuryek valleys from the Pech River Valley on the north side of Sawtalo Sar. Twelve hours later, Marines of Golf Company would enter the Narang Valley on the mountain’s south side, and twelve hours after that, Marines of Fox Company would push into the Chowkay, one valley west of the Narang. Wood, Donnellan, Westerfield, and Rob Scott felt that the final showdown between the Marines and Shah’s small but growing army would take place in the upper Korangal, possibly by Chichal, once the extremist determined that all of his escape routes had been blocked, as Fox and Echo met at the planned rendezvous point at the tiny village of Qalaygal, about five kilometers to the southeast of Chichal at the very upper reaches of the Korangal. Jim Donnellan and Tom Wood would head downrange with other key battalion staff and a large contingent of Afghan National Army soldiers, participating in the operation on the north side of Sawtalo Sar. Matt Tracy would perform his roles at A-Bad, and accompanying Matt would be twenty-seven-year-old Captain Zach Rashman, a Marine CH-53D heavy-lift helicopter pilot working with ⅔ as a forward air controller. But while Rashman would pride himself on the large amount of time he spent in the field over the course of the battalion’s deployment, during
Whalers
, the FAC would spend his time entrenched in a concrete room with Tracy, maintaining constant contact with all aircraft in the area of operations. Rob Scott would remain at JAF, maintaining continuous communication between Marine commanders, Task Force Devil, and CJTF-76. During
Whalers,
Rob would continue doing what he did best—and had been doing since he checked into the battalion—keeping the ⅔ machine rolling forward toward their mission goal, which for
Whalers
was to “disrupt ACM activity, providing stability and security in support of the upcoming September elections.”

Wood and other senior ⅔ staff would lean on time-tested USMC tactics and techniques, literally taking pages from the
Small Wars Manual
in their development of
Whalers
. Indigenous forces would not just accompany Donnellan and his staff during the op, but travel in trace of all units, learning and honing their combat skills under the guidance of the Marines in the vein of O’Bannon during the Barbary Wars of 1805. All communication would be tightly integrated—tested and retested— with redundant backup, before
Whalers
kicked off. Although aerial resupply drops might be available from high-flying C-130s, the grunts would portage their gear deep into hidden corners of the region on their own backs and on the backs of scrawny local mules. The plan of action tightly integrated all available indirect fire assets, from 81 mm mortars, to Doghouse’s 105 mm howitzers, to close air support assets including AH-64 Apaches and A-10s—planned just as they had during the predeployment training exercises they’d done at Twentynine Palms. This would be no surgical, highly specialized strike triggered by technology-dependent SIGINT hits; instead,
Whalers
would unfurl on the land, progressing upward step by thrusting step, funneling the enemy through the Hindu Kush’s labyrinthine topography into the Marines’ grasp to crush Shah and his force.

Although tasked with undertaking one of the key roles in
Whalers
—that of driving deep into the Chowkay as the final piece of the op’s master plan—Marines of Fox Company hadn’t yet operated in the Sawtalo Sar region. Upon arriving at their forward operating base at Laghman province’s Mehtar Lam, the Fox Marines immediately embarked on missions targeting an extremist operating in the area, a man who called himself Pashtun. Pashtun had been responsible for killing two of 3/3’s Marines in May of 2005, and had proved an elusive enemy. Led by the stalwart Captain Kelly Grissom, who first served as an enlisted combat engineer before graduating magna cum laude from North Carolina State and commissioning as a second lieutenant as an infantry officer, individual platoons of Fox embarked on grueling multiday operations that brought them deep into the Hindu Kush, and drove Marines to their physical breaking points.

Not just surviving the gravity-fighting ordeals, but growing increasingly stronger, the grunts of Fox Company quickly acclimatized to their new environment. Rotating the company’s three platoons in a regular pattern—an outside-the-wire mission tracking Pashtun, then a rest cycle, then a stint at base security before embarking on another foray into the heights—Grissom drove his Marines to hone their mountain-fighting skills and prepare their lungs and legs for the high altitude and steep terrain. By August, the grunts of Fox were ready for the combination of heat, steep earth, and seemingly endless days of hauling their 80- to 110-pound combat loads in chafing packs encased in suffocating body armor in the Chowkay.

Faced with determining just what size force he should send into
Whalers,
Grissom looked to base a maneuver element around a single platoon, reinforcing them with 81 mm mortars. And the platoon Grissom chose for the critical role in
Whalers
was Fox-3. Commanded by twenty-three-year-old Second Lieutenant J. J. “Konnie” Konstant, Fox-3 had seen its share of foot-pounding, back-galling movements into the cruel Hindu Kush. During one such operation, the platoon had actually pushed into Nuristan, through the Alingar Valley, where they took mortar fire from a series of caves. Charging ahead, sensing that Pashtun must be close because of the intensity of the attack, Konnie radioed Grissom, pleading for clearance to assault the cave complex. But Fox-3 had pushed outside of ⅔’s area of operation; and their patrol fell on 28 June—when all available air assets had been put on standby for the rescue of the SEALs, so Fox-3 returned to base. A high school basketball star from the south side of Chicago who attended St. Ambrose University as a business and finance major on an athletic scholarship, Konnie seemed to have his entire life planned in his very early twenties. Then, like so many in the current crop of young Marines, he woke on the morning of September 11, 2001, to the infamous al-Qaeda attacks, attacks planned in the very mountainous part of the globe through which he would lead troops in 2005. He shelved his plans to become a businessman and aimed for USMC infantry.

Konnie, along with Fox-3’s fear-inspiring thirty-two-year-old platoon sergeant, Lee Crisp III, a staff sergeant from Laurel, Mississippi, aggressively challenged every one of the grunts of his platoon, both physically and mentally. “Where we going and when we goin’ to get there?” was a question often uttered by Konnie’s Marines early in their deployment during long foot-mobile ops.

“We’ll tell you when we get there. Now keep movin’, and keep lovin’ life,” was the inevitable answer from either Crisp or Konnie. Konnie saw Crisp as the ideal hard-ass, unfaltering in his projection of rigidity and toughness, and Crisp fondly regarded Konnie, whose cool, cigarette-smoking manner and calm drawl reminded him of John Wayne, as a “crazy-ass motherfucker.” Grissom, who on more than one occasion pulled both Konnie and Crisp aside to discuss what the captain felt to be their overextending of Fox-3’s grunts, ultimately viewed the duo as uncannily in phase with his own outlook on leadership through fire.

“I really don’t think you can go in with just a single platoon reinforced, Grissom,” Donnellan told Kelly during the latter part of the
Whalers
planning process. Based on the after-action report of Jesse Chizmadia’s brief mission into the Chowkay, Grissom surmised that the terrain would likely pose the toughest challenges to the grunts of Fox-3 and that the threat of enemy contact in the local villages seemed small. “You really should strongly consider taking two platoons,” Donnellan insisted, knowing that while Shah would most likely retreat to Chichal for a fight, as that was the village in which he had the strongest ties, he and his men could lash out anywhere in the four valleys surrounding Sawtalo Sar. Grissom agreed, ultimately planning to take a second platoon—Fox-1—and attach a full 81 mm mortar section (four 81 mm mortar tubes and full crew) and a sniper team, in addition to forty-five Afghan National Army soldiers.

Konnie, looking to learn as much as possible about this part of the Hindu Kush that he and his Marines had never before ventured into, sought the most recent after-action reports from operations in the Sawtalo Sar area both to glean general insight into the region and to learn Shah’s tactics. The report he thought to be most relevant, of course, had been that of the Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. Konnie studied the two-and-a-half-page after-action and attempted to visualize the team’s final moments. Shortly after Luttrell’s team had been soft-compromised by a couple of local goat herders, Shah and his men had opened up on them. The SEALs moved into the gulch below them, attempting to establish comms with friendly forces. But Shah’s group, which Luttrell estimated to number between twenty and thirty, killed all but the corpsman, then landed an RPG round next to Luttrell, knocking him behind a rock. Attending to his own extensive wounds after regaining consciousness, Luttrell evaded the ACM fighters by hiding deep in the recesses of the gulch, even submerging himself at one point in a pool of water as Shah and his men passed just feet by him. Konnie, like others in the battalion, also studied the footage from the two Shah videos, noting the extensive amount of gear now in the hands of the extremist and his group. While most of the stolen gear showed up on the video, Lieutenant Konstant, after reviewing the recon team’s equipment manifest, wondered what had happened to the sniper rifle. Just like the night-vision equipment, the M4s, the spotting scopes, the laser rangefinders, and the grenade launchers, he had to assume that Shah and his men had in their possession, and would possibly use, the powerful, long-range sniper rifle against the Marines of ⅔ in any engagement during
Whalers
.