Victory Point (37 page)

Flying at only sixty-five knots of airspeed, and with about one thousand vertical feet to go to surmount the north ridge, Henninger heard the last sound he wanted to hear through his headset—a warning alarm, signaling him to check the bird’s diagnostics. The helicopter’s master caution light and his number-two engine “chip light” flickered on, meaning that sensors had detected metal chips in the turbofan’s oil, which could possibly shut the engine down and send the Dustoff crashing onto the mountain below. Unable to turn, Henninger gazed at the lead Apache as it approached the crest of the north ridge—then disappeared. Buffeted by strong thermals spinning off the steep ground below, the aviators could make out details in individual branches of high cedar—virtually at their eyes’ level. At the very crest of the north ridge, with less than fifty feet to spare, the Dustoff pilots pitched the noses of their Blackhawks up and they passed under Sawtalo Sar’s summit, then torqued the craft down like a roller coaster, into the Korangal—regaining airspeed and visual on the Apaches.

Letting out a huge sigh of relief, Henninger could hear Rashman talking to the Apaches about the LZ. The Shocks had pushed ahead, in order to scout the area for any RPG-wielding bad guys. When Henninger approached the tiny, sloping landing zone, marked by a purple smoke grenade, he thought for sure that it would be a hoist mission, where they’d drop a litter on a winch. But closer still, he and the aircraft’s crew dogs realized that they had just enough space to nestle the craft onto the ground. Henninger circled the craft and hovered high above the slope, with the helicopter’s nose facing the Korangal Valley. Constantly monitoring the aircraft’s systems, particularly that chip light, Henninger began the slow descent. As a group of Echo-3 Marines hauled Pigman on a tarp toward the inbound bird, the Dustoff crew poked their heads out the side doors of the Blackhawk and called out distances while Henninger—who’d never undertaken a closed-confines landing before—placed the tail of the craft between two small trees, just eight feet apart. With the bird’s gear on the ground, the crew chief casually stepped onto Sawtalo Sar as the Marines, carrying Pigman, stormed toward the craft. But the helicopter barely sat on the ground—Henninger couldn’t completely let off the collective, which controls the pitch of the rotor blades, as he had to keep the rotor tips from drooping and striking surrounding trees. With their heads hung low to avoid running into the rotors, the grunts loaded Pigman, now doped up on morphine, into the Dustoff. Roy, although not seriously injured, was also ordered to get on the medevac so that a doctor could check his back for any injuries.

With the crew chief signaling that all patients had been secured, Henninger expertly lifted the Blackhawk into the sky. As the dust cleared, Eggers could see Roy smiling at him, waving, as if to say, “Have fun on your hike down. I’ll be eating ice cream at an air-conditioned hospital—thinkin’ about you!”

12

W
hile the Marines of Echo and Golf companies continued to squeeze Shah’s remaining forces into the upper recesses of the Narang, Shuryek, and Korangal valleys, Battalion Command sought to have Fox Company continue their march toward Objective-4 on the sixteenth. But with 19 August looming ever closer, Command realized that the Fox Marines wouldn’t have enough time to egress before the deadline if they moved farther north. So, as of the morning of the sixteenth, Fox-3 and Middendorf’s mortar team would stay put, and First Platoon and the Afghan National Army soldiers would travel back to Hill 2510. Then the call came ordering all of Fox-3 to begin their movement out of the Chowkay beginning on the morning of the seventeenth.

“Crisp,” Konnie said to the staff sergeant. “I told everyone yesterday to ‘shave away a new day’ . . . yet I see some guys with stubble.” The lieutenant was referencing his order that all the Marines in the platoon shave the day after the firefight. He’d learned about this from an instructor at Infantry Officers’ Course who believed that the simple act of shaving could dramatically change one’s outlook and boost his morale. “‘Get those bristly faces nice and smooth,’ I told them.”

“Some of these grunts, you know, Lieutenant, they had hairy arm-pits when they were like eleven years old. Shit grows fast, even up here,” Crisp responded. Both knew that, joking aside, the fresh supply of food, water, and ammo, not to mention some rest—and a clean shave—would go a long way toward lifting the spirits of the grunts.

“So we’re not goin’ any higher, huh?” Konnie asked Grissom, disappointed.

“As of now, no. We’re headed back. Task Force Devil figures that what took us sixteen hours to climb up will take forty-eight hours to get out of,” the captain explained.

“Sir, that’s funny to me,” Konnie began, wondering just how much of Shah’s force remained. “I wish we could stay up here for weeks, sir, at least until we get every last of Ahmad Shah’s little—now littler—army.”

“I’m with you, Lieutenant. Really, I think we should set up a combat outpost right up here, permanently man the place. That’s the only way to do it.”

“Or just take care of ’em all right now—I mean, I guess we have less than, what, twenty-four hours to do it?”

“Well, yeah. If they attack again.”

“Come and get some . . .
bitches.
” Konnie stretched out his arms and wagged his hands, then slowly spun around and gazed up at all aspects of the high valley, as if he knew that one of Shah’s men had him pegged within the reticle of a high-powered spotting scope.

As Fox-1 moved south that morning, the platoon’s interpreters picked up ICOM chatter indicating that some of Shah’s men had sighted them and were setting an ambush. As First Platoon surmounted Hill 2510, the radio traffic exploded in volume and intensity. Lieutenant Geise, preparing for a possible maelstrom similar to the one Fox-3 had endured, dispatched some Marines and Afghan soldiers to probe the area to the hill’s south and had the bulk of the platoon assume a strong defensive posture. Shots rang out—signaling a possible massive onslaught—but then the valley fell silent. The ANA had detected a small band of Shah’s men approaching them with AK-47s; the soldiers engaged—and the attackers turned tail and ran.

The activity throughout the Sawtalo Sar region following the attack on the fourteenth seemed to paint a picture of a fractured force—but as fractured as that picture may have been, it was brushed with strokes of ever-determined fighters. Back at Fox-3’s patrol base, Pigeon worked with two A-10s, trying to utilize their targeting systems to scan the area around their encampment. But the infamously fickle weather of the Hindu Kush proved the undoing of that plan. Mushrooming cumulus dotted the skies above the Chowkay and other valleys on the sixteenth, granting only fleeting windows through which the Warthogs could glimpse the landscape during their day’s mission, preventing them from providing Pigeon with much information.

Enemy indicators abounded, however, on the ground surrounding Fox-3. Peering through a spotting scope, Konnie noted a bizarre sight that afternoon. “Looks like we got a donkey train—goin’ up that ridge to the east of us,” he said to a lance corporal who was lying next to him. “But no donkey-train tenders. Those guys are loaded down, and on donkey autopilot.” A line of the small, scrawny beasts, each about the size of a large German shepherd, weighed down with boxes slung over their backs with colorful rope, wandered up a trail on the shoulder of Cheshane Tupay. A few hours later, the “convoy” came galloping down, empty. ICOM traffic continued to increase through the sixteenth, but the most telling moments of enemy determination and presence came by foot. Two men, from the village of Jubagay, just to the east of the crest of Cheshane Tupay’s south ridge, strolled to the outskirts of camp early in the afternoon.

“They are asking that the Marines just leave,” Jimmy translated. “They say that there is no reason for you to be in the valley.”

“Well, we got six reasons recovering at Bagram,” Konnie immediately shot back. While Jubagay had been one of the villages to which Donnellan, Wood, and Rob Scott had wanted the Marines to venture during
Whalers,
the time limit wouldn’t allow it. Not knowing the true nature of the village—and who actually lived there—the Marines sent the duo back. But they were replaced by yet another villager claiming to be from Jubagay a few hours later; this time, the village elder.

“Sir,” Jimmy told Grissom, “the man wants to know who you are; where are you from.”

“Just tell him that we’re Marines from the United States. We’re here to get rid of any of those who want to bring back the Taliban,” the captain calmly answered, but he was suspicious of the man. The elder left, but long after his departure, Konnie and Grissom learned that he’d asked a number of other probing questions, very specific questions—and had gotten answers, not from any of the Marines, but from the interpreters.

“You told them
what
?!” Konnie exploded when he learned that the elder had inquired about the size of the force of Marines at the camp, how much food they had, how much ammunition, what types of supplies landed during the CDS drop, how the Marines had been positioned throughout the camp—and other important tactical details. “Well,” the lieutenant concluded, “we can be sure that they know where we are, and what our capabilities are.” The security breach emphasized the difficulty the Marines faced in Afghanistan. Their COIN campaign required that they work side by side with locals, in part to prove their intentions. But in a corner of the Hindu Kush as remote as the Chowkay, one where many of the locals had never even seen a Westerner, those locals could be easily co-opted by forces such as Shah’s—and used, as had happened that afternoon, as spies. Jubagay represented an extreme example, as the battalion had no record of any coalition forces ever having visited the place, as one of the most remote in all of Afghanistan.

“We need to move our camp around—not by much—but displace everyone. You can bet that by now, Shah knows exactly where our command post is located,” Konnie seethed. “He probably also knows the position of our machine guns and our perimeter defenses.” Grissom agreed. Konnie made plans to offset the various positions of the platoon’s elements, some by just a few tens of meters, others by a few hundred—Grissom’s only requirement being that the command post be situated such that a radio operator could aim an antenna to get SATCOM. Only the mortar team, which Middendorf and his Marines had emplaced and fire-capped within a small fortress of stout boulders, would stay put.

At dusk, cloaked by the darkness of the deep valley, Konstant told his Marines about the planned rearrangement, and he and Crisp helped to establish new positions for the grunts. With utmost stealth, and moving quickly, the Marines got the repositioning under way. Konnie located the command post—which he, Grissom, Pigeon, and Middendorf would occupy—about three hundred meters to the southwest of the old post, where Shah, Konnie figured, would have what was left of his men aim their weapons should they attack. With a CDS drop planned for early the next morning, after which Fox Company would begin their descent out of the Chowkay, Grissom, Konnie, and Middendorf all felt that half the Marines should sleep while the other half stood watch, once they’d completed the position shift.

“Sir, ICOM traffic!” Jimmy the interpreter interrupted the officers’ discussion.

“Oh, great, Jimmy. More ICOM traffic. Let me guess, there’s nine thousand of them, and they all got flamethrowers,” Konnie sarcastically responded.

“Listen, Konstant, we need to take every transmission seriously,” Grissom snapped. “What are you hearing, Jimmy?”

“There are two groups, and they are talking to each other. The man from the first group said, ‘We are all in position, are you there yet?’ And then a voice from the other group said, ‘Yes, we are all here,’ and then the first guy asked, ‘How many men do you have?’ And that man responded that he had forty,” Jimmy summarized.

“Well, if we’ve heard that they’re massing between forty and sixty guys to come get us, we’ve heard it a million times,” Grissom responded. “But let’s stand to anyway,” the captain finished, ordering that all Marines stand security.

“And then, Commander Grissom . . .” Jimmy chimed in.

“What is it, Jimmy?”

“And then they said one more thing. The commander man said, ‘Good, we’re all set, do everything we talked about—but no more talking on the radio or on the phones.’ And that was it, Commander Grissom. The ICOM talk went dead.”

“Now that’s somethin’ we don’t hear them do very often. Mouthy motherfuckers always tryin’ to scare us with their ICOM chatter. They never give the order to shut up like that,” Konnie interjected as Konstant, Middendorf, Grissom, and Pigeon stared at one another pensively, each revealing genuine concern over Jimmy’s last bit of intel.

“Okay. Everybody stay sharp—as usual,” Grissom ordered. “Sounds like somethin’s imminent—real imminent,
like within minutes
.” The officers spread the word for all the Marines to keep extra focused, on heightened readiness.

But minutes drifted into hours, and the attack never came. The grunts, scanning the surrounding peaks with their NVGs, found nothing even slightly out of place. No unusual lights, no sounds, nothing. With a big movement on the near horizon, and with the Marines slammed with fatigue from the past days, Grissom okayed the return to 50 percent security, allowing half of the grunts to get some much-needed sleep. Jimmy’s translated message had caused just another false alarm; in the silence of the dark, cloud-raked night, Konnie, Middendorf, and Pigeon slipped into an almost comalike sleep—along with half of the other Marines of the element—for the first truly rejuvenating rest they’d had in days.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant! LIEUTENANT!” Staff Sergeant Crisp roared, shaking Konnie, who was sleeping on the dirt wearing just a T-shirt, underwear, and his laced-up boots. “Lieutenant Konstant! How you sleepin’ through this! How the fuck you sleepin’ through this?!” Konnie woke up to Crisp slamming his shoulders against the dirt, the staff sergeant’s face and Kevlar helmet flashing white, yellow, and red.