Victory Point (30 page)

At 2:00 A.M. on the thirteenth of August, Whiskey’s Humvees reached their limit, ten kilometers into the valley, at the village of Amrey. As the empty convoy headed down the steep terrain toward lower ground, the grunts set about the last of their preparations for the journey ahead, stuffing their packs with enough water and MREs to last a full three days, as well as checking their combat gear, and even basics like toothpaste and shoelaces. Amrey village lies at the convergence of two main arms of the Chowkay, one that strikes to the northwest, and one branch that heads to the northeast. The Fox Marines would move up the northeast valley—the upper Chowkay—along the Amrey Creek bed, toward the base of a mountain named Cheshane Tupay, a 9,528-foot-high peak about eight kilometers southwest of Sawtalo Sar. While their route would traverse roughly six kilometers of horizontal distance, those six kilometers would take the Fox-3 Marines from an elevation of just over 3,000 feet at Amrey, almost a vertical mile higher, to roughly 8,000 feet at the base of Cheshane Tupay, the latitude of
Phase Line White
, from which the Marines would then re-embark on their journey toward Objective-4—once approved by higher, of course.

Fox-3 wasted no time hurling their packs onto their shoulders and pushing off on their pump into the upper Chowkay. Their eyes attuned to the muted glow of the half-moon, the Marines dug into their task, moving single file up a narrow trail into the darkness. The pitch-black of the bottom of the steep valley virtually blinded them, while the walls looming above them glowed eerily under the wan light, the rock faces so coarse that even the moon’s muted light cast harsh shadows off bare slabs, boulders, and cobbles. They couldn’t be certain if they walked on the trail itself, or if their route simply meandered near the pathway—and they certainly wouldn’t use lights, of any kind, to help them stay on track. Konnie, traveling with his platoon’s First Squad at the lead end of the movement, at first used a small compass and a GPS unit for guidance, but then resorted to raw tactile navigation, relying on the soles of his boots and the strain in his legs against gravity to “feel” his way into the heights of the Chowkay. As Grissom had said in his talk just a few hours prior, “Just keep walking—up.” Guided by the deep recess of the valley itself, the grunts closed on their destination, by doing just that.

The glow of dawn’s approach revealed the landscape the Marines had known only as tightly packed contour lines on their maps as some of the steepest, most daunting topography any of them had ever witnessed. Never stopping for more than five minutes at a time, the grunts inhaled their water throughout the grueling nighttime haul, their legs burning under the struggle to inch ever higher over smooth boulders, around narrow ledges, over tree stumps, and sometimes along terraced hillsides. By sunup, just a few hours into the mission, many had killed half their three-day supply. As soon as Crisp’s eyes detected the light of dawn, his skin felt the first inrush of the heat he knew would soon wallop the grunts like a tsunami. By the time the sun rose above Cheshane Tupay to their northeast—a mountain so steep that many of the grunts couldn’t see its summit because their helmets bunched into the tops of their backpacks as they tried to look up—the heat had topped 110 degrees.

“Fucking donkeys!” Lieutenant Stuart Geise, Fox-1’s commander, blared to one of the lance corporals in his platoon midmorning on the thirteenth from his disembarking point near Amrey, when a call came over the radio from Grissom on the status of their movement.

“You guys movin’ yet?” Grissom asked, staring at ever-steepening terrain above him.

“Fuckin’ donkeys!” Geise roared aloud, then jumped on the radio in response to Grissom’s request. “We’re moving, but it’s the damn donkeys.” He paused. “They’re . . . delaying us.”
They’re fuckin’ donkeys!
he screamed in his head.

“All right already. You need to push hard, Geise,” Grissom barked, peeved at the delay.

“Those donkeys, you got ’em loaded up, right? They moving with you guys?”

“No, sir!”
The fuckin’ donkeys are fuckin’ fuckin’ each other,
the exasperated lieutenant bellowed in his head, not able to state the case over the radio—then explained it in more sanitized terms.

“What? Each other?” the bewildered captain asked.

“Yeah. They’re mounting up on one another. And some committed suicide—they just jumped off the cliffs! It’s a circus. None of us can control these—”
Little bastards,
he thought.
Fuckin’ jumpin’ off cliffs! Loaded with our chow and water. Runnin’ around!
“—donkeys!” Geise responded.

But Ben Middendorf already had the solution; he’d ordered his Marines to unload the supplies off the backs of the donkeys, then divvy up the cargo among the grunts, “spread-loading” the gear. With their four-legged logistical means no longer an option, Ben got on the line with battalion’s assistant logistics officer, Lieutenant Hal Everheart, and let him know that the element would need resupply by CDS drop—and due to the heat, they might start needing those drops soon. “Get all the gear and supplies off the donkeys and spread load everything. Your packs are gonna weigh a ton, but we can’t have you delayed any longer. Just get moving!” Middendorf ordered his Marines.

 

 

 

“Damn, Lieutenant, the hell with those bad guys, it’s this valley and this heat that’s gonna do us all in,” Crisp said to Konnie during a noon rest outside a tiny village under the looming Cheshane Ghar ridgeline. “Ain’t neva’ been so hot in my life!”

“It’s just gonna keep getting more fun. I can’t wait for more of it,” Konnie coolly responded. “Just think about all the fun we’ll have once the bad guys start shootin’ at us. It’s all about smokin’ cigarettes and slingin’ guns, Crisp.” The lieutenant feigned a wistful tone as he cracked a grin.

“Commander Konstant!” Jimmy the translator approached Konnie with a shy local villager in tow. “The man is confused about you and the Marines. He thinks that you may be the Russians.”

“The Russians?” Konnie responded, taken aback for a moment. Then the lieutenant realized just how deep into the valley that Fox-3 had penetrated, so deep that they’d run into a villager who probably hadn’t seen an outsider since the Soviet occupation, decades earlier. “Jimmy”—Konstant turned toward the villager—“tell him that in fact we are the Russians—and that it is 1987, and we’re about to defeat the Americans in the Cold War.” Jimmy translated as ordered, then the villager stared blankly at Jimmy and Konnie, and after a brief moment of silence, the Marines threw on their packs and continued higher. “Come on, comrades,” Konnie quipped, “onward for Mother Russia.”

By midafternoon, the grunts had put approximately four kilometers—and thousands of feet of elevation—to their rear. While the high sun drove the air temperature into the 120s at ground level, the men found themselves surrounded not only by walls of shattered rock and house-size boulders, but by lush green; with altitude came dense tracts of ferns and large cedars. As they entered the hottest part of the August day, however, they had to fight not just to keep moving, but to keep from collapsing. Crisp, himself struggling in the dangerously torrid conditions, kept a hawk’s eye on every one of the Marines in the platoon. Drenched in sweat from the inside out, dehydrated, burning with pain where their pack straps dug into their shoulders, their heads throbbing inside the ovenlike Kevlar helmets, their eyes stinging with sweat pouring off their foreheads, they’d reached their limits.

“Okay, Marines. We’re done,” Konnie proclaimed, himself feeling shredded by the toughest feat of endurance he’d ever undertaken—and fighting not to show it. Just as the Marines had reached what he and Grissom felt to be the outer edge of combat effectiveness, the lieutenant spied a perch on which they could put down—at least for a few hours, maybe all night. “We’re staying here until further notice,” he stated. “Here” was a point on a hillside about a half kilometer west of the Amrey Creek bed, a few hundred feet shy of eight thousand feet in elevation. “We just went nearly a mile—” The Fox-3 Marines shot Konnie a look; to them, “nearly a mile” had felt like fifty. “—a mile
up
. Pretty much five thousand feet
vertical
in the last eighteen hours. Good job, Marines,” the lieutenant finished in his typical, understated tone.

The patrol base, exactly two kilometers to the southwest of Cheshane Tupay’s summit, while just shy of
Phase Line White
, stood in as good a position as the platoon could hope to have, despite being surrounded by high ground from which Shah and his men could attack, Konnie had chosen a location that stood back from the high terrain as much as possible. Additionally, the patrol base lay at the eastern base of a small hill, to which the lieutenant sent the snipers and half of First Squad, to provide overwatch of the encampment and to keep the location secured, and it was an ideal helicopter landing zone, should the grunts need a medevac. Konnie, relying on tried-and-true tactics he learned at the Basic School and at Infantry Officers’ Course, set a perimeter defense around the patrol base, established a casualty collection point behind some large boulders, then set himself at the east end of the camp facing Cheshane Tupay, what he felt to be the most probable location from which Shah would launch an ambush.

“Nobody does anything but keep an eye out for the enemy,” Konnie instructed. “Nobody takes their eyes off the surrounding terrain. Nobody sleeps, nobody eats,” he finished, with a glaring Crisp at his side. Grissom and Pigeon established a command post in the cover of some large downed trees a good distance from Konnie’s position to ensure that if Shah attacked with overwhelming opening salvos aimed at the CP, the Marines wouldn’t be left without leadership. For the remainder of daylight on the thirteenth, everyone at the base stood watch, scanning every trail, rock, ridgeline, peak for any trace of Shah.

As Fox Company battled the elements and the terrain to reach their position, the platoons of Echo in the Korangal and the Shuryek pushed southward, and Golf moved up the Narang. Donnellan and the Jump CP moved along the north ridge of Sawtalo Sar, intending to link up with Second and Third platoons in the Korangal Valley, and meet with locals and leaders in a number of the valley’s villages. Everything had been timed and choreographed perfectly so that Shah and his small army would fall right into ⅔’s hands—but just where would the showdown happen? That, nobody knew. ICOM chatter, intercepted by Golf Company’s interpreters in the Narang, indicated that some of the extremist’s force was on the run out of the Korangal and had tried to move into the Narang—until they spied the grunts, and turned around. Blocked in the Shuryek as well, Shah’s force had to move toward the Chowkay, but coalesced in strength as they did so. Intel revealed that Shah had elements of his force located at different villages throughout the upper Korangal, and that once he was on the run, he was merging these elements into a force of between sixty and eighty fighters, all moving toward the grunts of Fox Company.

Stymied by the intractable donkeys, but determined to position his mortars to ensure that Fox-3 was safely within the weapons’ umbrella of indirect fire, Middendorf led his mortar team, along with Fox-1 and the Afghan soldiers, into the upper Chowkay during the very worst of the day’s heat. Each Marine carried at least one mortar round, twenty bottles of water, six MREs, and his own weapons and ammunition; without the donkeys, they also carried the four 81 mm mortar tubes, each weighing a total of over 93 pounds (able to be broken into three components, the gun tube weighs 35 pounds, the mount 27 pounds, the base plate 29 pounds, and the sighting unit weighs 3 pounds). Thus many grunts carried over 130 pounds of gear—on a movement with temperatures in the deep, bare-rock valley of over 120 degrees.

By nine o’clock that evening, as the last of twilight faded, Middendorf set up a patrol base within a draw on the steep western face of the Chowkay Valley. Despite the heat, the terrain, and the weight on their backs, his grunts had traveled over two kilometers, covering an incredible 3,500 vertical feet. But their movement, like Fox-3’s, didn’t come easy. Some Marines were suffering from acute dehydration, which required corpsmen to rehydrate them not with bottles of water, but with IVs. Others bent over, vomiting, during the hellacious march. But perched at their night’s camp, high on the slope above the Amrey Creek bed, Middendorf’s all-important mortar tubes stood at the ready to support Fox-3; at just two and a half kilometers north of the mortar team, they sat well within the effective range of the weapons.

 

 

 

“Sir!” Jimmy the translator ran to Konnie’s position at the Fox-3 patrol base around seven in the evening. “Sir, Ahmad Shah and his men are looking for you. We have heard them talking over their ICOMs!”

“What are they saying, Jimmy?” Konnie asked.

“They have a lot of fighters. I don’t know how many. But a lot. And they are looking for the Marines. They are coming into the Chowkay Valley!” Kelly Grissom, who had also been apprised of the ICOM chatter, wondered if an attack was imminent, or if the messages had been sent solely to get intercepted, for psychological purposes. Every last grunt continued to stand watch that evening, glaring at the landscape as the shadows of dusk swept across the Chowkay. At nine o’clock, with the grunts not having had a wink of sleep in over thirty hours, Grissom moved the patrol base from 100 percent on watch to 50 percent, thereby mandating some sleep for the unit’s Marines.

The pitch-darkness of the night drove home the insularity of the Fox company’s situation. Amrey village, the closest point with vehicle access, was hours and hours away by foot. Medevac support was iffy at best. And Middendorf’s 81s were their sole organic indirect fire support assets, while close air support was as much as a full hour away. Knowing as well that they were surrounded by Shah’s force, the Marines of Fox Company dug in for one of the longest nights of their lives.