Victory Point (38 page)

“Wha—” The disoriented Konstant opened his eyes, clutching at the dirt below him as the most coordinated, most intense of Shah’s attacks yet pummeled the encampment.

“Man, get yo’ crazy ass the fuck up—sir!”

Konstant awoke to the hisses of incoming RPGs, the earsplitting booms of exploding 82 mm mortars, and the greenish white streaks of PK machine-gun tracer rounds cracking and whizzing above Crisp’s head. He grabbed his M16 and dashed for cover.
Boom!
A mortar connected with a large log next to which Konnie and Middendorf had been sleeping, obliterating it and blowing Pigeon and Dorf—both fully geared up—fifteen feet down the steep hillside.

The lieutenant clawed his way to the top of an embankment to get eyes on the attackers’ positions. Rounds were pinging off rocks around him and punching into the dirt just feet in front of him; he could hear the distinctive fizzle of glowing tracer rounds’ burning pyro—and smell the combusting material’s stinging odor. The tracers converged on the camp from a semicircle of positions emplaced on the surrounding mountains, their streaks appearing like spokes on a wheel. Then the RPG storm began; from three different positions, over ten rocket-propelled grenades tore onto the old command post, the crude ballistic weapons seemingly in a competition with the raining mortars to completely obliterate the position. Had they not shifted locations just hours earlier, Grissom, Pigeon, Middendorf, and Konnie would undoubtedly have been killed. Completely pinned down, and with only the one magazine already in his M16’s well, Konnie could only unload thirty rounds into the machine-gun position, and that machine-gun position was a long way off, far outside the max-effective range of his M16.

Middendorf, blown awake by the mortar blast just meters from him, immediately linked up with Grissom and Pigeon, and put a call to Corporal Daniel Shelton, his on-site “fire direction center,” who would ensure that the targeting data the lieutenant passed to him got relayed accurately to the individual gun operators. Middendorf, however, relied on his PRR—Personal Role Radio—a standard two-way comm set used to communicate with others in close proximity—to speak with the gun team. But in the covered position that he, Grissom, and Pigeon had taken, Dorf couldn’t get the required line of sight with Shelton’s PRR. Having studied the terrain over the past day while he developed his fire-support plan—anticipating the most likely locations from which Shah’s force would attack—Middendorf already knew the exact spot he needed to hit. He just had to give Shelton a four-digit number, referencing an already-plotted grid, and within seconds, the very worst of the incoming fire would cease—violently cease. But he couldn’t establish comms with Shelton; so the tubes stood silent. As the seconds ticked away, the barrage grew even worse, with mortar rounds now “walking” onto the new command post’s position and RPGs crashing down throughout the grunts’ camp. As Pigeon worked furiously to get air on station, Dorf repeated in his head that the only way to avert certain disaster was to get mortar rounds downrange. “I’m leaving,” the lieutenant said as he slapped Grissom on his rear SAPI.

“Are you fucking crazy?” the captain shot back. Rounds peppered the dirt around their covered position; the Marines choked on a low-hanging fog of dust and vapor from detonated explosives and burned cordite. The RPGs and machine-gun fire kept coming—and coming, ever more accurate. The professionalism of the attackers struck Middendorf; he couldn’t believe they could hit their marks from such distances. He had to get his mortars on target. The lieutenant jumped over the small berm before him and sprinted up the terrain. “What the fuck, Middendorf? You’re gonna get yourself KILLED!” Grissom howled.

“You, too? You crazy, too, like Lieutenant Konstant?” Crisp shouted as he unleashed bursts from his M16. “You been drinkin’ out of the same—the same
whateva-tha-fuck
—water hole as Konstant!”

Married since 2002—and looking to have kids so that maybe one day he too could talk his son into joining the Marine Corps after graduating West Point—Middendorf thought of his wife and then said good-bye forever to her in his head as he tore a path toward Shelton under the press of copper-jacketed lead hurling through the Afghan night at supersonic speeds, shock waves slapping his eardrums with loud
cracks! Eyes on,
he thought, after seventy-five meters,
eyes on the tubes,
then dove flat onto the ground and pressed the microphone to his dirt-encrusted mouth. “Corporal Shelton!”

“Copy!” came Shelton’s response.

“Fire Alpha Oscar 3303! Fire Alpha Oscar 3303!” The lieutenant commanded his Marines to unleash what he’d planned to be a crushing barrage from all tubes simultaneously at the target, three times total.

“Roger.” Each of the four gun teams adjusted the elevation and deflection of their mortar tube, snapped a C-shaped charge onto the neck of a round just above its fins, then dropped it into the tube.
Thunk- thunk-thunk-thunk
followed by a stentorian
crack! crack! crack! crack!
Four 81 mm mortar rounds accelerated away from the team’s position at hundreds of meters per second, hurling in unison toward their apogees, then sailed down toward the same mark. But before the parabolic arcs of those first rounds had crested, the team had four more en route—then four more after that.
Whump whump whump whump!
Seconds later, Alpha Oscar 3303 erupted in a mass of concussive fireballs, the mortars completely laying waste to the enemy position.

But more of those positions remained, and the mortar team’s barrage left them with just seven 81 mm rounds. Not knowing if Pigeon had aircraft inbound—and conscious of the necessity of deconflicting his mortar fire with flight paths—Middendorf again tore across the open field of fire to get line of sight with Grissom and Pigeon. A quick back-and-forth revealed that airpower hadn’t yet arrived. But then another of Shah’s positions opened up—more mortars, RPGs, and machine-gun fire rained down, loosed by roughly fifteen extremists. Middendorf dove back toward his team. But the new enemy position wasn’t one on the list of the lieutenant’s predesignated grids.

Unknown to Middendorf, Corporal Joshua Plunk, working in an uncovered position with rounds splitting through the air around him, already had the group of fifteen in the crosshairs of gun number four’s sight. Carefully adjusting the deflection for a “direct lay” mortar attack by keeping the crosshairs squarely on the group as he leveled the gun, the corporal then grabbed the mortar team’s “Vector” laser rangefinder.
1,775,
the red digital readout flashed after Plunk depressed a small button on the top of the precision optic. Plunk laughed at the irony of the range—the year the Marine Corps was born—and pulled out his “whiz wheel,” a circular plastic “mechanical computer” used to determine gun elevation and round charge based on a target’s range. As Shah’s men belched out machine-gun and mortar fire from their position, Plunk grasped one of the team’s last rounds and hung it over the flared mouth of the gun, then with a flick of his wrist, sank the mortar into the guts of the tube.
Crack!
Then he sank another.
Crack!
Seconds later, as Plunk pressed his head into the coarse ground to keep well below the enemy’s low-flying rounds, his two mortars plowed into the mountain.
Whump! Whump!
The last of the tracers from the position fizzled into the night as Plunk’s two rounds impacted dead on target.

With the mortar team’s four-gun barrage and Plunk’s direct lay onto the fifteen-man position, the Marines gained decisive control of the battle, shredding the two most concentrated of Shah’s strongholds. With those machine guns pinning Konnie down now silenced, the lieutenant grabbed his flak, Kevlar helmet, and ten more magazines of rounds, and Pigeon continued to work to get close air support on station.

But still, some of Shah’s men remained. At the Marines’ most lonely position in the Chowkay that night, an observation post stood up on some high ground to the west of the main force, seven Marines—two snipers and members of the platoon’s Second Squad, led by Corporal Chris Smith—had been on the receiving end of an intense barrage of machine-gun and RPG fire from a position just over two hundred meters away. Taking well-aimed shots at the attackers’ muzzle flashes in the night, Lance Corporal Mark Perna heard so many rounds impacting throughout the small position—but without the enemy scoring any hits—that he likened the moment to running through a summer thunderstorm yet emerging completely dry. While the small group immediately returned fire, the enemy shot from stoutly dug-in positions, and their fire seemed to focus ever more tightly and intensely with each passing second. Just as Shah’s force seemed to be on the cusp of achieving one victory in the night’s battle—with screaming RPGs exploding around the seven Marines and machine-gun rounds peppering their hillside—Lance Corporal Ernest Padilla grabbed an AT4 rocket, loaded with an HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) warhead, and steadied it on his shoulders, released its safety levers, and cocked its firing pin. As another volley of RPGs swooshed toward the Marines, Padilla shouted, “Is the backblast clear?” to make sure that none of the other Marines stood within the cone of superheated gasses about to roar out of the tail end of the launch tube.

“You’re good!” a Marine yelled. Lining up the aiming sights on the bright flashes of enemy fire before him, Padilla squeezed the trigger.
Click—Boom!
Reddish-orange fireballs popped out of both ends of the launcher. Padilla tossed the spent tube as the warhead accelerated toward the insurgents—then struck their position, dead-on. The grunts continued firing, then the enemy fell completely silent.

“This is Fox-1, I think everyone in Fox-3 is dead—the entire platoon!”
On Hill 2510, Geise pondered how he’d make the call to battalion higher as he watched the attack that night unfurl before his eyes.
There’s no way they can survive that,
he thought.
It looks like a scene from
Star Wars,
with all those green and red tracers and exploding balls of yellow flame
. Then a small number of Shah’s men attacked Hill 2510. Geise directed his Marines to return fire—and as happened a few hours earlier, the aggressors turned and ran. Fox-1 would continue to hold firm as
Star Wars
raged on.

“Come on, Konnie, now’s not the time,” Middendorf began as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, assuming that Konstant had run to his position—which was still taking sporadic fire—to bum a Marlboro.

“No. I’m not here for a smoke,” Konnie responded as Dorf tried not to laugh at him. Konstant was wearing just his flak, Kevlar helmet, boots, and underwear—no pants. “Pigeon needs us to work up targeting grids. He’s got air on the way. But they need ten-digit grids for a JDAM drop.”

“What’s with your hand, Konnie?” Middendorf asked. Blood, from a shrapnel gash, was oozing from the top of Konstant’s right hand. “Guess your luck ran out tonight.” Middendorf laughed.

Konnie looked at his watch—a minute past midnight on the seventeenth of August. “Hey, I just realized that it’s my birthday. I just turned twenty-four this minute.”

“What a birthday party you have here,” Middendorf observed drily, then jumped into the job of finding targets for Pigeon. But a ten-digit grid, required for Pigeon to clear a JDAM GPS-guided bomb drop, was far too small a plot of land—one square meter—to resolve on Middendorf’s map. He and Konnie, doing a quick map recon, determined the most likely routes of egress for whatever of Shah’s force had survived. But the highest resolution Middendorf could discern was an area represented by an eight-digit grid (ten meters by ten meters). So he just added a zero to the northing and a zero to the easting, then passed the now-ten-digit grid to the FAC.

Cruising at over thirty-five thousand feet, a B-52H Stratofortress of the Air Force’s Fifth Bomb Wing based out of Minot Air Base in North Dakota, tracked toward the Hindu Kush and the Chowkay Valley, packed with two-thousand-pound GBU-31 JDAMs. With the survivors of Shah’s force now on the run, Pigeon worked up a final attack plan for the bomber, based on the grids identified by Middendorf and Konstant, as Grissom, Konnie, and Middendorf looked on.

“What’s takin’ so long, Pigeon?” Konnie asked.

“A B-52 doesn’t turn on a dime, Lieutenant,” the FAC shot back. “Not like those A-10s that can just fly around in tight circles all day long
inside
the valley.” With direct comms established with the B-52, Pigeon began to pass a nine-line brief to the bomber. Their detailed instructions received, the pilots began to position their massive craft for the attack, taking them out of range of Pigeon’s radio. Waiting for a read-back, a confirmation that the aircraft had received all information in the nine-line correctly, Pigeon, realizing that the B-52 couldn’t hear his transmissions, jumped on SATCOM to Rob Scott. “Comms are down between me and the B-52,” he told the XO. With the huge bomber carving a broad turn into its final attack heading, Rob, in yet another example of his acting as the glue to keep the battalion’s operations moving forward, immediately contacted the Air Force’s ASOC, or Air Support Operations Center, in Bagram, which contacted the B-52. With a tenuous connection established, Rashman once again stepped up to the plate—using Pigeon’s coordinates, Zach got a read-back sent to Rob Scott and Ratkowiak and gave the cleared-hot call down the channel. As clouds began to roll in over the valley, the bomber released one GBU-31, its destination grid having been programmed into its guidance system by the bomber’s crew. As the B-52 then turned off its attack run, Pigeon prepared to call in a second strike as the bomb’s fins clacked back and forth, deflecting at computer-adjusted intervals, sending the huge munition inside an invisible cone of ingress with the tip of that trajectory field pricking the one-square-meter patch of earth Middendorf and Konnie reckoned to be where the last of Shah’s men would most likely be grouping. Just over forty seconds after the B-52’s crew released the bomb, night flashed to dawn and the JDAM erupted in a blinding fireball on the ridge to the north of the platoon.