Victory Point - Ed Darack [1]
And while most all of Afghanistan—both its people and landscapes—epitomizes the notion of ruggedness, the eastern Kunar province, that rarely visited and little-known pocket of the infamous Hindu Kush, can arguably claim the title as the most austere, the least tamed. The first bullets of the insurgency that would burgeon into the anti-Soviet resistance were fired here in the late seventies. Osama bin Laden was known to operate terrorist training camps in the Kunar and likely ordered the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States in this province. And into the summer of 2005, the most fearsome of Islamic fundamentalist fighters operated in the Kunar.
At the core of this restive province stands a massif cloaked to the outside world by the very brutal landscape of which it is part, a mountain called Sawtalo Sar. The peak, one of the highest in this cloud-raked landscape, lies in the Pech River Valley region of the Kunar, just west of the frontier town of Asadabad. A number of valleys radiate from and around Sawtalo Sar, valleys such as the Korangal, the Shuryek, the Narang, and the Chowkay. Deeply recessed into the high landscape, the villages, pasturelands, and interconnecting ridges and zigzagging trails of these valleys would become the home of some of the most dedicated, well-trained, and fervent Islamic fighters remaining along the Afghan-Pakistan border—and, for that matter, the world.
As of the summer of 2005, the military forces of the United States had ventured little into the Korangal and Shuryek—and never into the upper reaches of the Chowkay. Regional Afghan political officers and even members of the Afghan military dared not enter these forbidding and terrifying places. Locals of these valleys—vehement and fierce adherents of their own brands of independence—have historically resisted outsiders’ gestures, which they perceived as attempts to influence and control their isolated ways of life. However, bold and fervent Islamic groups including al-Qaeda, through payoffs and by manipulating loose familial and tribal ties, infiltrated these secretive aeries. With their observers perched high on the ridges of Sawtalo Sar and surrounding mountains—watching, always watching—the fighters ambushed convoys of humanitarian aid supplies, assassinated local Afghan police officers, and wreaked havoc on the local government, destroying hopes of a wholly unified Afghanistan through their acts of terrorism.
Then the United States Marine Corps arrived. The Marines—the go-anywhere, do-any-mission cadre of modest professionals who have proven time and again to be the most effective war-fighting machine in human history—would once again leave their mark, a mark of triumph, as they had done so many times before. The United States Marine Corps are a fully integrated land-sea-air expeditionary combat force—masters of light infantry maneuver and the “combined arms” assault—and their culture itself has powered individual Marine units as small as a four-man fire team to surmount even the most overwhelming of odds—in conflicts and battlegrounds of all types and climes, throughout their more than two-centuries-old history.
The success of the Marine Corps, in so many places, throughout so many slices of history, can be traced to the qualities at the very core of their ethos: adaptability, tenacity, and above all else, faithfulness—to their country, to their traditions, and to one another. As maniacally as the Japanese held their ground on Iwo Jima, Marines still raised the flag over Mount Suribachi. As overwhelming a force as the Chinese may have projected at Korea’s Chosin Reservoir, the Marines still crushed their advance. And as deeply entrenched and fanatically emboldened as the radical Islamic forces surrounding two Marine Corps platoons in the Chowkay Valley may have been in August of 2005, those Marines still decimated their foe.
Victory Point chronicles Operation Red Wings and Operation Whalers, two Marine Corps missions that, in retrospect,