Victory Point (39 page)

“What about the second grid, Pigeon?” Konnie asked excitedly as Marines in the distance cheered at the billowing fireball, followed seconds later by the rumbling
whump!
of the distant impact. “Let’s finish ’em off.”

“I’m Rolexing TOTs, Konnie. With the comms the way they are, things are taking more time than normal,” Pigeon explained to the lieutenant—in aviator lingo—that he had to push back the time on target for the second JDAM.

“Come on, Pigeon,” Konnie goaded. “Smoke check—”

“Okay, Konstant. Shut the fuck up!” Grissom began. “And why don’t you go and put some fucking pants on, Lieutenant. You look absolutely ridiculous standing there. A real model officer, aren’t you? And what’s with your hand?”

“RPG, sir. Hit by shrapnel,” Konnie explained as he exhaled a long banner of cigarette smoke.

“Great. We were
almost
able to say that we got in that huge contact with the enemy and got out of it completely unscathed. But you had to go and get hit by RPG shrapnel—the only one of all the Marines out here tonight to get injured.”

“But it’s my birthday, Captain,” Konnie said, oozing sarcasm, before leaving to don his proper uniform.

“Cleared-hot,” Rashman called, working with Pigeon, the pilots, Rob Scott, and the ASOC after he received the read-back.

“Roger, bomb on target within the minute,” Rob Scott passed to Pigeon. After the night’s second “rumbling sunrise,” this time over a ridge to the northeast of the camp, the valley fell silent.

“Think we got ’em all, sir?” Konnie asked Grissom.

“We’ll know soon enough.”

13

U
p to sixty enemy killed in action over the past three days out of a force of eighty to one hundred—BREAK—enemy command and control now virtually nonexistent—BREAK—” Kelly Grissom earnestly listened to Rob Scott’s intel dump early in the morning of 17 August, the XO’s breaks giving him time to transcribe the information gleaned from numerous HUMINT and SIGINT sources. “Demeanor of survivors extremely hostile—BREAK—small bands of survivors staging to ambush coalition forces in both the Chowkay and Korangal valleys and possibly along the Jalalabad-Asadabad road—BREAK—these bands are possibly on suicide missions—BREAK—Ahmad Shah severely wounded—BREAK—possibly shot or possibly hit from shrapnel—BREAK—escaped to Pakistan and now seeking medical care.” The second-to-last line in the transmission put a grin on Grissom’s face. The insurgent leader, gravely wounded during the fighting, had been “medevaced” by way of his men carrying him on their backs and then on the backs of donkeys, down from Cheshane Tupay, out to the Kunar Valley on the ridges between the Chowkay and Narang Valleys at night—then stashed away in a car’s trunk driven into the Peshawar region of Pakistan. ⅔ had crushed the force that had posed the greatest threat to the region’s upcoming elections—the small army that had brought tragedy to the SEAL recon team and their rescuers, and caused untold chaos and destruction throughout the region.

But, as Rob Scott summarized that morning to Grissom, small pockets of Shah’s paid force lived on, and sought to inflict as much destruction on ⅔ as possible—through ambushes, possibly suicidal in nature. Shah had ordered his remaining men to fight to the death in a sort of ad hoc jihad, to engage the Marines wherever they could as ⅔ egressed from the high valleys surrounding Sawtalo Sar.

Fox-3 prepared to break camp well before dusk on the seventeenth of August in anticipation of a final CDS resupply drop and a strong push to move back to Amrey village. Once at Amrey, Whiskey Company’s Humvees would transport them to the mouth of the Chowkay, where they’d head back to their forward operating base at Mehtar Lam. Having gotten no sleep after the
Star Wars
firefight, the Marines just wanted to get moving that morning—the sooner they made headway down the valley, the sooner they’d finally get some sleep.

“Work your magic again, Pigeon,” Konnie said as he heard the first wavering drone of an approaching C-130. “We can’t be wasting time and energy chasing all over the place for off-target CDS drops.”

Using the technique he’d devised a couple of days earlier, the FAC controlled the C-130 for the resupply drop just as he’d control an A-10 dropping a laser-guided bomb—
he’d
make the drop call, and instead of having all containers dropped at once, he’d have the Hercules crew make a number of runs, “clearing-hot” just one package during each pass. Once again, Konnie and the other Marines of Fox-3 stood in awe of the Hornet aviator’s almost uncanny ability to integrate air platforms with the ground element—be those air-assets attack aircraft dropping deadly munitions on enemy targets or cargo birds delivering much-needed supplies to friendly positions.

But while their supply problem of just a few days prior had been scarcity, after the big parachuted containers swooshed into the drop zone that morning, the Fox-3 Marines realized that they’d been resupplied with enough food, water, and ammunition to last them another full week. And since speed ranked as the highest priority at that point in
Whalers,
portaging all those additional supplies would only serve to slow the already-beleaguered Marines, further exposing them to the few of Shah’s determined men who remained. “We should just take what we need, and then have the engineers blow this stuff,” Grissom thought out loud. But after conferring with the engineers, who told him that they didn’t have enough demo to blow the overflow items to a point at which they’d be worthless to the enemy, the captain gave the command to spread-load the gear—days-upon-days’ worth of food and machine-gun rounds.

But the mortar rounds would see a different fate. As Fox-3 worked to distribute the overload items, distant explosions rang out. Lieutenant Geise contacted Grissom: “Sir, they’re trying to adjust fires to your position, but they’re off by eight hundred meters!” Middendorf immediately had his team prep the gun tubes for a powerful barrage—using the excess mortars just delivered by the Hercules.

“Commander Grissom! Commander Grissom!” Jimmy the terp sprinted toward the captain. “They’re shooting at us!”

“Thanks, Jimmy, but I don’t need you to interpret explosions for me—just Pashto.”

“No, sir. Yes—” the flustered Jimmy began. “I
know
that you can hear the
booms,
but I am hearing them talk about trying to find you, they can’t see where we are at.”

“Hold tight, Jimmy. We’re in the process of taking care of these guys right now.” Within minutes, Middendorf’s four 81s stood as a canted phalanx, ready to unleash the just-delivered high-explosive rounds. With known enemy positions already plotted, Middendorf first had his gun teams send volleys at those targets farthest south, where the enemy could possibly get direct eyes on Fox-3’s position.

“Sir,” Jimmy interjected, grabbing Grissom’s attention. “They are now saying that they see the explosions from the Americans—and that they are nowhere near where they are sitting!”

“Hit the northern targets, Dorf.” Grissom passed to Middendorf what amounted to the enemy’s own fire adjustments—on themselves. The gun team realigned their tubes and within seconds had rounds directly on target; Middendorf then ordered a fire for effect, catapulting rock, earth, and Shah’s men skyward.

“What are they sayin’ now, Jimmy?” Grissom asked with a sarcastic smile.

“Nothing—nothing at all, actually.” Jimmy gave the captain a stunned look. After a few minutes, the terp finally had some news: “Sir, others are saying that you just killed all of them and destroyed their mortars. They’re very mad at you and the Marines for this.” Grissom laughed. “Now they really, really want to kill you all for this.”

The captain just shook his head. With yet more of Shah’s remnants obliterated, Middendorf had his team pack up the gun tubes and then the grunts pushed south, linking up with First Platoon and the Afghan soldiers at Hill 2510. Grissom now faced a tough decision: push south by heading into the depths of the valley—their route
up
the Chowkay—or take the more tactical, but more difficult-to-traverse route on the high ground of the western wall of the valley. Weighing expediency and ease of terrain against the remaining enemy’s determination, Grissom had only one choice—run the high ground, despite it challenges. After a brief rest on the southern shoulder of Hill 2510, Fox-3, Fox-1, the mortar team, and the Afghan soldiers began the trek southward.

“You’ve been using ICOM scanners! Monitoring enemy transmissions! That’s SIGINT! You’re not authorized to do SIGINT work! We have specially trained teams for that. You need to have those scanners turned off—turned off right now!” came the voice from one of CJTF- 76’s senior intel officers at Bagram, roaring at Rob Scott for ⅔’s use of ICOMs in adjusting fires on the morning of the seventeenth. “You’ll be interfering with sensitive SIGINT work we already have under way!”

“Those ICOM scanners have saved countless lives at this point—just in
Whalers
alone,” the XO responded.

“Turn those ICOMs off. Turn them off now!” the irate officer blared—as Jimmy continued to feed translated intercepted ICOM traffic to Grissom.

“Commander Grissom! More ICOM traffic.” Jimmy grabbed the captain’s attention once again that morning. “They’re hurting bad, and still want to kill you—but they can’t find you!” The ICOM use confirmed that taking the high ground had kept the Marines and Afghan soldiers out of the gunsights of the last of Shah’s men. Jimmy’s information also indicated to the captain that they might not have been detected because Shah—if he were even still alive—simply had so few remaining troops under him.

Back at JAF: “I’m not turning those ICOMs off. I’d be crazy to do that. They’re saving lives as we speak! I don’t care how it’s seen by higher command—
anyone
—if we have something that’s keeping our Marines functioning—keeping them safe and alive—they’re gonna keep using it. Period.” The line went dead. Rob Scott never heard another word from the intel officer.

As it had during their march up, the Chowkay’s terrain proved to be a near killer—even more so on the Marines’ egress, as they’d chosen a route that traversed ground that was severely lacking in trails and brought them along the edges of dangerously steep, often vertical rock faces. At times, their movement bordered on rock climbing. Sensing the hesitation of the Marines, Crisp continued to prove himself a moving orator in the heights, ensuring that the line of grunts progressed southward at an even clip. “Osama bin Laden himself gonna be out here soon and git yo’ asses, y’all movin’ so slow!”

With so many exhausted, battle-weary troops moving through such extreme terrain in the summer heat, the environment was destined to claim a victim. “Marine down!” one of the grunts yelled in the middle of the afternoon as a lance corporal slipped off a cliff edge and landed on his back after falling over thirty feet—his pack absorbing much of the force of the fall. With sharp jabbing pains in his spine, the Marine nevertheless continued to press on—but after an hour he couldn’t take any more. A corpsman who took a look at his condition surmised that he’d probably fractured a vertebra. The Dustoffs once again jumped into action, pulling him off to Bagram, where doctors determined that indeed, he had broken his back.

The southward movement proved to be the most difficult yet for the Fox Marines during
Whalers
. By early in the evening on the seventeenth, exhaustion and heat-induced dehydration actually caused many of the grunts to begin hallucinating. Even the stalwart Crisp felt as if his feet were shredding and joints grinding during the push. And despite moving toward the opening of the Chowkay, the Marines didn’t descend in altitude much as they pushed along the high ridge. By four o’clock in the morning of the eighteenth, as an AC-130 gunship orbited overhead scanning the area for enemy activity, the grunts bedded down for a few hours.

“We’re never gonna make it outta here, man!” Konnie overheard one of his Marines breaking down as the column moved into a steep draw above Amrey village, their conduit between the high ridge they’d traversed and their extract point. “Nobody knows where we’re goin’—no sleep in days—hot as hell itself, even at night!”

“We’re making it out of here just fine. So shut the fuck up,” Konnie said. “We know right where we’re going.”

“Roger . . . sir.” In fact, during the brief rest early that morning, Grissom scouted ahead, locating a direct line into Amrey and the extract point—a very direct line. Often sliding down rock slabs and clinging to tree limbs as they choked on dust and the heat of the day, the grunts walked and skidded down a steep draw, funneling them into Amrey. But as their rate of descent picked up, so did the ICOM chatter. By the time they reached the extract point—just before noon—the ICOMs were blaring constantly with enemy voices trying to coordinate yet another attack. And when the grunts stepped off the steep slope of the rocky draw onto the level ground of the village, they couldn’t find a soul: the town was deserted, an ominous sign.

“We made it,” Grissom stated to Crisp and Konstant. “Whiskey’s highbacks and hardbacks will be here shortly.”

“We got a lot of awards to write up,” Konnie remarked as he gazed at the completely spent grunts—too exhausted even to express relief. Out of water, they sliced off the tops of their water bottles and scooped water from muddy puddles left from recent rainfall, then collapsed against their backpacks. The sheer physical challenges posed by the Chowkay and the grip of combat would leave indelible marks on every one of them.

“We ain’t out yet,” Crisp remarked to the resting grunts. “Stay alert. Don’t get yo’ asses killed!”

 

 

 

“Sir.” Jimmy approached Konnie. “Now they’re saying that they want to organize the people of the villages below Amrey to fight you. They are going to a mosque in the lower valley to announce it to everyone.”

“Great. Just what I wanted to hear, Jimmy.”

Just then a convoy of Whiskey Company’s Humvees rolled up to the village. Fox-3 and half of Middendorf’s mortar team were loaded into five highbacks, with Whiskey’s command element in the lead vehicle. As the sound of engines faded, Konnie and Grissom spotted two enemy, each with an AK-47 and one with an ICOM, on a ridgeline high above them. Both officers immediately fired, causing the two to flee. Regardless of their exhaustion, the brief encounter reminded all the Marines to stay alert. As that first convoy rolled out of the village, every one of the grunts kept his eyes on the ridges above and surrounding them, and their weapons at the ready. A small caravan of Toyota Hiluxes had also arrived, and carted away the Afghan soldiers, leaving just Fox-1, with Pigeon, Middendorf, and Grissom, whom Whiskey would pick up on their next turn. High above the Chowkay, two A-10s arrived and checked in with Pigeon. Also showing up for the extract, an RQ-1 Predator UAV—rare in that area of operation—buzzed above the grunts with feed beamed via satellite to a host of commands, including CENTCOM, Task Force Devil, CJTF-76, and the JAF COC, where Rob Scott watched “from above” as the Marines coursed down the steep road to lower ground.