Victory Point (35 page)

“Pop smoke!” Pigeon ordered. Two Marines each yanked the pins out of purple smoke grenades and tossed them onto a drop zone Pigeon had designated.

“Hope they kick that shit out at just the right moment,” Konnie mumbled under his breath.

“Here it comes.” Pigeon craned his neck back as the Hercules swooped overhead. On board the craft, the loadmasters watched six large crates careen on rollers out of the open cargo hold and into space, drogue chutes deploying just seconds later. Banking hard after the drop, the Hercules disappeared behind a high ridge, leaving only the supply crates, swaying below their green chutes, in the sky above the Marines. The men were always on guard during CDS drops, since the heavy cargo could easily squash an unknowing grunt, but the parachutes’ trajectory quickly showed there to be no danger of a crushing death. In fact, the drop missed the area completely.

“Off.
Way off
. It’ll take two
fuckin’
days to recover that stuff,” Konnie muttered in a pissed-off tone. “Guess we’re stayin’ red for now.”

 

 

 

Just over a kilometer to the southeast of Fox-3’s camp, Ben Middendorf, having decided to co-locate his mortar team with Fox-3 after conferring with Grissom, began moving toward Hill 2510. Not wanting to cover the same ground that Fox-3 had traversed during their push up the Chowkay for fear of walking into an ambush, the lieutenant felt it best to move by way of the terrain to their west. But Middendorf and his Marines were also red on supplies; the one-kilometer movement, down the steep ground to the Amrey Creek bed, then back up even steeper slopes on the base of Hill 2510—portaging the heavy mortar tubes—further weakened the already-enervated grunts. Arriving at dusk at an isolated village not shown on any maps, Middendorf noticed the chilling sight of a white flag waving above one of the village buildings—a sign of solidarity with the Taliban. Under the dying glow of twilight, the Marines greeted the standoffish villagers, then bedded down for a few hours just outside the tiny enclave—maintaining very tight security.

While Middendorf and the mortar team were closing on the village on the slopes of Hill 2510 that evening, Pigeon worked with another C-130 on a second CDS resupply attempt. This time, through a number of low passes, the trajectories of which he computed with his map and his instincts, the FAC guided all six loads perfectly on target, one by one. “Pigeon,” Konnie commented, “you just continue to dominate awesomeness.” Completely green on supplies, Fox-3 would be able to fully stock Dorf’s mortar team—once they arrived. The next morning, with Fox-1 and the Afghan soldiers still providing security for them, the mortar team broke camp before dawn and pushed north toward Fox-3 and their much-needed food, water, and ammunition. Middendorf first led his team to the top of Hill 2510, to get a commanding view of the route ahead for the grunts. Scanning the distance, the lieutenant noticed two men watching the Marines—no weapons, no ICOMs, just two men observing them. Unsure if they belonged to Shah’s cell, if they had been employed by the terrorist as lookouts, or if they were just villagers walking the area’s trails, Middendorf decided to press onward. With the mortar team weak from exhaustion, dehydration, and now near starvation, he split the team in two to move by leapfrogging, keeping two mortars always ready to fire as the grunts with the other two tubes pushed northward. By noon, the Marines had drunk every drop of their water and their corpsmen had administered their last rehydration IV. With their destination just a half kilometer away, a lance corporal collapsed in the heat.

“Unless you get up and fuckin’ walk,” Middendorf acerbically began, “you
will die
.” Each Marine in the team had deteriorated to a level Middendorf had never before seen; they stared at the lieutenant vacuously from sunken eyes—many having bent over with jabbing abdominal cramps and vomited. “I can’t explain the reason, but you will die, and possibly cause other Marines around you to fuckin’ die as well.
Now get the fuck up!
Let’s go!” Pressured by the lieutenant’s forceful command, the lance corporal staggered to his feet and fought onward with the group, which finally arrived at Fox-3’s camp a few hours later.

“Hey, man. How you doin’?” Konnie asked Middendorf upon his arrival.

“I’m doin’ a lot better than you guys. I’m glad you’re still alive. So what happened?” Dorf asked back.

“I think we killed a lot of bad guys,” Konnie told him. “Is that bad?”

“I don’t think its bad,” Middendorf replied. “I think it’s great. How’d you not get your ass shot off?”

“I’m good at a lot of things, Ben,” Konnie said, “but I’m best at bein’ lucky, I guess.”

 

 

 

The Chowkay wasn’t the only corner of ⅔’s area of operation during
Whalers
to witness bullets flying and sweat-drenched toil. Golf Company Marines continued to push northwest in the Narang Valley, and Kinser’s Echo-1 had penetrated deep into the Shuryek, moving up its eastern wall to Golayshal, the southernmost village in the valley, lying at the same latitude as the summit of Sawtalo Sar. The Jump CP, with senior leaders of the area’s Afghan National Army in trace, moved along Sawtalo Sar’s spine, then dropped into the Korangal, meeting with villagers during
shura
meetings. Donnellan, who sought to have the ANA capable of undertaking security in the critical valley as soon as possible, worked to establish amicable relations between the Afghan Army brass and the village elders. Through an interpreter, Donnellan learned that the inhabitants of Korangal village—throughout the valley, for that matter—had wanted a heightened presence of Afghan government personnel, be they police or ANA soldiers. But those villagers who spoke up—about a dozen of them in the past year—had been killed by anticoalition militia types such as Shah.

“How many times have you been to the Korangal?” an elder asked Colonel Nasir, the highest-ranking officer in the Afghan National Army traveling with the Jump CP.

“Never,” Nasir replied, after a long pause.

“Why?” the elder asked as he sipped chai tea.

“Because . . .” Nasir paused again. “Because
I’m afraid of the Korangal
.” This attitude was one the Marines would work to completely reverse.

Also moving through the Korangal and along Sawtalo Sar during
Whalers,
Keith Eggers and two other members of Team Ronin, Corporal Joe Roy—Eggers’s twenty-one-year-old spotter—and twenty-one-year-old Navy Hospital Corpsman Third Class Jamie “Doc” Pigman, had been tasked with providing forward observation and bounding overwatch of Echo-3, who would be pushing south into the Korangal Valley. Long before sunrise on the twelfth of August, after a previous night’s meeting with Echo-3’s platoon commander, Nick Guyton, Ronin started up the steep Bakaro Ghar, a spine of gray, shattered rock connecting the opening of the Korangal Valley with the north ridge of Sawtalo Sar. Climbing along loose talus, around teetering boulders, and up small cliffs—avoiding trails to maintain concealment from any unfriendly eyes—the trio gained the north ridge by midmorning, as Echo-3 made strong headway into the Korangal below them. Then Keith received a call from Echo Company’s commander, Captain John McShane, who stated that fresh intel had revealed a sizable force of foreign fighters massed in Salar Ban, just on the other side of Sawtalo Sar’s north ridge from Ronin’s position.

“Want us to check it out?” Keith asked. McShane felt uneasy; the report stated that upward of eighty fighters had gathered in the village. “We’ll be going right by an ideal overwatch spot anyway; we might as well,” the sergeant continued. Furthermore, in addition to Echo-3, Echo Company’s Second Platoon had been working their way into the Korangal. As well, the Marines of Camp Blessing had forward-deployed two 120 mm mortar tubes at the mouth of the Korangal, capable of providing instant indirect fire support, and Doghouse’s 105s stood at the ready at Asadabad, able to range to Ronin’s position with RAP rounds. McShane reluctantly authorized the observation—but for only one hour.

After donning their ghillie suits (camouflage composed of densely packed, long strands of green and brown fabric for concealment in densely vegetated areas) and striping their faces in olive-drab and black camo paint, the trio moved into position and “glassed” Salar Ban with a powerful Leupold spotting scope. “Nothing. No fighters whatsoever,” Eggers reported to McShane after sighting just villagers—including women and children, who typically leave once extremist fighters arrive. Ronin would continue their overwatch mission for Echo-3 during the following days, preparing to link up with the platoon at Sawtalo Sar’s summit on 16 August. Those intervening days, however, wouldn’t pass easily. The amount of specialized equipment they carried—optics and radios, not to mention the sniper rifle itself and its support gear and rounds—meant that they portaged over one hundred pounds each, spread between their packs and gear harnesses, and like the other Marines of ⅔ during
Whalers,
they fought to stay hydrated in the intense heat. Searching for small streams while maintaining cover and providing overwatch proved exhausting. But the risks of their mission meant that they’d get few chances to truly rest and rehydrate—and they had to maintain the very sharpest of focus.

“So, we’re gonna get overrun by Shah’s guys, huh?” Joe Roy skeptically asked on the evening of the fifteenth at their hide above Echo-3’s patrol base just outside of Chichal.

“That’s what they say—based off the ICOM hits the terps are picking up,” Eggers responded. “
Apparently
they’ve seen us. But I don’t care how many times I’ve heard it and it turned out to be bullshit, we’re not taking any chances.” The three of them set claymore antipersonnel mines around a solid, densely treed “harbor site” at the top of steep ground above Chichal in which they’d remain concealed for the night, downed some caffeine pills, and waited—silently scanning the surroundings through their night-vision equipment, and most importantly, listening intently for the approach of anyone in the dead-still air.
It’s so densely vegetated you’d have to be superhuman to get to us without us hearing,
Eggers thought.

The night passed without incident—and without sleep, and at dawn, Ronin got word that Echo-3 was fast en route to Sawtalo Sar’s summit to investigate some suspicious smoldering fires, possibly left by Shah’s men during their movement into the Korangal from the Chowkay after the firefight with Fox-3. The three scout/snipers of Ronin stealthily moved out of their hide and vectored up the north ridge to observe and then meet Guyton’s platoon at the summit. With a mission spectrum far broader than targeted hits against individual personnel, Marine scout/ sniper teams are often tasked by commanders to undertake the type of “bounding overwatch” missions that Ronin performed throughout
Whalers
. Acting as the “eyes forward”—not just watching out for, and then using their precision rifles to interdict, ambushes against other Marine elements on the move, but acting as observers for forward air controllers and mortar and artillery teams—Eggers and Team Ronin combined their knowledge of the area’s terrain with their specialized training to virtually guarantee that units whom they overwatched could safely move through an area. As stealthy, fit, and well trained as they were, however, three men—completely unsupported—stood little chance of survival should an enemy force of greater number descend upon them. Thus, as he had always on such missions, Eggers kept constant watch over his radios—the team’s lifelines of support.

“Hides,” Pigman noted near the summit of Sawtalo Sar later that morning. “Damn, this is where they probably concealed themselves during the ambush of the SEALs.” Eggers, Roy, and Pigman studied the positions Shah’s men had made—nothing dug in, but rather walled up with large, felled trees, concealing their locations within the surroundings. Topping out on the mountain’s summit at the same time as Ronin, Echo-3 planned to head back down Sawtalo Sar, descending first to Chichal then regaining the north ridge, along which Ronin would ply from the summit downward, providing overwatch as the platoon navigated the steep terrain. They departed around noon.

Moving quickly yet remaining well concealed, and staying to the west of the Super Highway, Ronin did all they could to stay invisible and keep eyes on Echo-3. But as each man in the team knew all too well, avoiding soft compromise on Sawtalo Sar after traveling the mountain’s slopes for over five days—especially after linking up with an entire platoon at the mountain’s summit—was virtually impossible. And so, a little over an hour into their descent, a lone elderly Afghan man appeared “out of nowhere,” as typically occurred in the region. The trio approached him—he was unarmed, carried no ICOM, and looked unkempt and extremely unhealthy. Pigman immediately locked onto the man’s milky-white eyeballs.
Trachoma,
the corpsman thought.
Eerie as hell
. The team attempted to ask him some questions in basic Pashto, but the man, whose clothes were torn and soiled, didn’t cooperate. Following their rules of engagement, they photographed him, then sent him in the opposite direction of their travel.

“I got a real bad feeling about that guy,” Pigman said to Eggers and Roy as the figure disappeared into the trees above them. All three, having read Marcus Luttrell’s after-action report, felt the encounter was a bad omen. “First we see Shah’s hides, then this guy,” the corpsman continued.

“All right. Let’s keep moving, gotta maintain eyes on Echo-3,” Eggers stated. In addition to their training as scout/snipers, each of the three had grown up with a love of outdoor pursuits. Pigman couldn’t get enough of hiking, camping, and hunting in his home state of New Jersey; Roy, from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, lived for hunting season; and Eggers’s activities ran the gamut from kite surfing in his hometown of Santa Cruz, California, to multipitch alpine rock climbing in the high Sierra Nevada. The trio might have been far from their stomping grounds, but they felt right at home in the wild environment of the Hindu Kush. Quickly and silently, Ronin flowed down the north ridge.